Seemingly random BSODs, when accessing win explorer, chrome, games,etc

oh, I've already ran two days worth of passes with both of my sticks in all slots. I guess I should have mentioned that.

I also ran chkdsk and the manufacturers diags on all my drives, no bad sectors.

Other than that, all I'm using is a GPU and motu media card, which i took out for testing anyways.

Is it possible that it could be caused by the cpu?

i still have my original load of windows on another drive i could use. I was going to try a clean windows load, but then it crashed.

I think I will give ubuntu a go though.

its been a while, but only because I sent my mobo back in to ASUS as an RMA. I got it back, and immediately got several bluecreens.

I decided that I needed to isolate some more variables. I stuck in a 2gb kingston memory stick into an absolutely clean win 7 load, no drivers or anything loaded. I've done this before and got bluescreens on a clean load, however, I decided to try this with a different stick of ram.

I didnt receive any immediate bluescreens and did some research while waiting. I found out that my specific model of ram was not on the "qualified vendor list". What was listed was the same module type but only as an 8gb stick, not as a 4gb. Mine was not listed at all (even though the model is the same, excepting one digit signifying size). The kingston stick WAS listed, so i started wondering if perhaps this stick was not really configured properly with the board.

I then decided to try to tweak some settings under the bios. I started to look under the settings to see if perhaps the bios configured the modules improperly. The board automatically detected the ram and recommended settings, however, i noticed that under XMP, only one variable was changed: the voltage. The voltage was boosted from the native 1.5V to 1.65V. I decided, just for kicks, to test the OC tuner feature, just to see what it gave me. It, of course, tuned the voltage up as well.

Doing some research on XMP settings with ASUS motherboards, I saw a few posts talking about how occasionally ASUS boards will undercut the power to the ram, so some slight tweaking may be required and/or advised.

Is this accurate? Could it be a factor? Would using this XMP setting be recommended?

the auto setting puts everything down to 1.5v, but some posts that i saw said that on occasion, asus boards will send less than it claims to do. They said that manually inputting the voltage is more reliable. I'm not necessarily sure as to the validity of this statement, but as far as I'm concerned, the only thing to do at this point is to change out the ram (even tho the ram i've used is verified as good), change out the CPU, or change out the board. Essentially, I would have to buy a new board as i dont have one i can couple with the CPU I have.

Just in case it helps, I included the SF diag reports for the absolutely clean load, no drivers, but also no activity. I let it idle and found later that it had blue-screened.

ok, thats sounds good then. I was just afraid that perhaps the xmp setting would have been better suited, or rather that the auto setting was not configuring properly. which still leaves me with nothing other than a suspicion of the mobo and cpu. *sigh*