GA 880-GA-UD3H Crashing BSOD

[Lukacko]

Hi I just built a new computer a couple days ago, got everything assembled yesterday, installed Windows 7 and was seemingly up and running but then I realized it would blue screen and crash every so often.  My specs:

Gigabyte 880-GA-UD3H rev 3.0
AMD Phenom 2 Quad Core 3.2ghz
8 gigs Corsair XMS3 dual channel DDR3 Ram
MSI N550 GTX-TI 1gig DDR5 Video card
Ultra X4 600 watt PSU (modular)
Seagate 1TB 7200 HD
Windows 7 professional 64 bit

Once Windows was installed and I started doing windows updates it was having trouble with the updates. When it would try to restart it would log me off, attempt to configure the update and then crash.  I eventually got all the updates installed doing one or two at a time. I think Windows even gave me an update to fix the crashing updates.

The computer runs seemingly well, but blue screens at random times, with random error messages. Once of the more common ones is "Bad Pool Header" another one is "IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL" other times there is no error message.

I tried to update my BIOS using the @BIOS program, but that will not work, it says it cant find the bin file from the server or something. I tried to download the BIOS from the website and run the FLASHSPI file but that said something about being 32 bit IIRC.

I don't know what else to do. It sees all my memory, my processor, my hard drive, video card... all seem to run smooth, except for the random crashes.

I was even able to download Steam, download one of the free games and run it for a while, but then it crashed after about 15mins with a different sort of error which didn't seem to be related to the blue screens.

Anytime I try to run and check the Windows Experience Index, it crashes.

Help me.

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome to the Gigabyte forum.

The first thing I would want to check is the memory. This will take some time but is worth doing properly. Please follow these instructions exactly.

I would suggest that you download and run the latest version of  Memtest86+ to check your RAM first.

Memtest86+        http://www.memtest.org/

Insert one stick of memory in slot 1 and run Memtest on it for at least 10 complete loops/cycles

and if there are no errors then swap it over with the next one and continue untill you have checked all 

modules.
 
If you have any errors the module is faulty.

If you have any faulty modules you will have to return the whole kit as they are matched.

Post back when you have done that with the results.

[Lukacko]

Thank you for your help.

So yesterday I began running memtest, ran all night, 19 hours total, through 10 full passes and came up with 0 errors. I guess I can assume the memory, processor and motherboard are ok.

In the meantime I did some reading and a common theme I saw was that drivers and software could be responsible.

So I removed my video card and uninstalled the nvidia drivers.  I also uninstalled any progrems that I had installed: AVG, chrome, firefox, steam...etc.  Got it back up and running, saw there was a windows update for ATI (probably for the onboard video) since I removed the geforce card.  Restarted and eventually crashed again.

I'm not sure what else it could be.  I guess I'll try to keep removing any programs still on here (I installed programs that came with the motherboard, some still on here).  The motherboard driver should be fine, I updated that yesterday with the one off the gigabyte website.

I'm running in safe mode with networking right now because it crashed while I was typing a reply in this thread.

Any other thoughts on what it could be?


EDIT: So I tried re-installing windows to see if maybe that would work.  It froze in the middle of the install and now I can't get it to install windows. I'm really frustrated with this board. I think I might just have to return it and get a board from Asus.

[Dark Mantis]

You mentioned the Gigabyte supplied programs there. I would recommend removing all traces of them from your system and see if that helps. A lot of these bundled programs (not just Gigabyte's) give problems and on the whole it is better to steer clear of them.