System Instability

[aastii]

I am not 100% on whether it is my memory or not causeing the problems, however I am now 99% sure it is, but it would appear that I am changing what I'm sure it is on a near daily basis at the moment.

 

My system has been haning/BSODing and on occasion after the problem, will POST, but will not boot into a windows environment, or into ubuntu, be it from a partition or from the disc. Throughout all of the tests I turned my overclocks off, and this has only been happening for the past ~2 weeks, before that it had been stable from around January. I haven't overclocked my memory at any point, only my CPU

 

I initially thought it was my graphics, as it would only happen when gaming, however after trying my card in another system, ruled that out.

 

I then thought it was my hard drive. As, so far as I am aware, the Samsung utility only has a 32 bit version, I couldn't use it, so thought if I ran HD Tune benchmark and it didn't fail (as the problems would only happen when the drive would be reading/writing at full speed, which the benchmark would do), I could rule that out, so ran the test, and no problems. I then formatted and reinstalled windows and all drivers, in case it was software related, but that did nothing

 

I then thought, for the second time, it was my memory. I had previously run memtest and it failed, so I tested both sticks individually, and both came back ok, so I retested with both sticks in and 17 hours in, no errors, so I assumed they were ok, but problems persisted. All of the tests were done with memory @1333MHz rather than 1600MHz, as I am aware that over 1333MHz with 2 sticks of memory isn't fully supported by AMD processors, so to make sure that wasn't having an influence on results, knocked it down.

 

I went back to the memory though, and changed the memtest configuration and found that changing Memory sizing, again flagged up errors. Now I am aware that the 2 non-default options (BIOS-all and Probe) can be unstable and hang/restart, however it is with BIOS-all that errors begin to appear, and I mean many, very quickly.

 

Is this down to my memory do you think, or would it just be because of the instability these tests can cause?