Double check to be sure you've got the heatsink centered on the cpu.
Don't overdo the heat dope, it takes very little, but be sure you've got even coverage.

Thanks everyone -- have replaced the PSU with a new 600W OCZ modxstream pro. Fingers crossed

Raw Kryptonite: ran prim95, one of the cores got a bit warmer than the others under full load (but <60C) - could this mean that contact with the heat sink isn't optimal?

Could, I'd just get in there with a flashlight and take a good look.

Thanks - under the Prime95 torture teststemps stay within 5 C of each other so I'm letting this go for now.

In any case, it looks like the problem is solved (touches wood) - more power solves problems!
Thanks everyone for their advice.

Freezing has returned, unfortunately. Found a 93 page thread on answers.microsoft.com by people with similar issues, unfortunately no clear answer. Back to the drawing board.

run Memtest on the Ram sticks individually and together. make sure all the ram are running optimally and no errors.

also check your Ram Usage when system gets slow.

this is how my old system would act when i use up all the ram/pagefile, and until i reboot it got crazy slow.

i had cases were my 2GB of Ram would have 1 MB free, and just clicking the task manager i had pinned took forever to come up.

i think I had some programs that had memory leaks (like Google Chrome did), as it would just chew up 800+MB sometimes for no reason.

Even on my new system Chrome tries to chew up as much ram as it can.

Thanks -- I have 8gb in a Win7 64 system so hopefully running out of memory shouldn't be an issue. Am running memtest now, which seems to run without any issues. May reset the bios which may help. One of my hard drives is a bit flakey, may disconnect it to see if that helps.

Bit Flakey how?

harddisks with a lot of bad sectors / failing will slow your system down to a crawl, expecially if windows is utilizing it.

I used to recover data for friends / family, and whenever i hooked a HDD that was failing it slowed my whole system down, windows took forever to boot, and accessing the drive in Recovery Software took all night to scan a small 40-80 GB Partition.

check event viewer hardware logs if there's HDD problems there should be NTFS / ATA / DISK errors/warining Icons.



also had a drive that for some reason lost power a few times, windows XP then kicked all my drives to PIO mode, which was crazy slow,

i had to reset my ESCD in my bios for windows to refresh the drive's hardware addresses and take them off lockdown, so I could force the override from PIO4 to UDMA4/5

Bit flakey as in speedfan SMART gives 0% fitness due to a Current Pending Sector Count of 2 and an Uncorrectable Sector Count of 1
Ran memtest for 9.5 hours last night without any problems.
Do you know how you match Disk Drives with IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers in Device Manager -- it seems that one of the drives is stuck in PIO Mode 4 and it seems to be my SSD drive - which according to AS SSD Benchmark is ok for msahci and does 500 mb/s seq read, 180mb/sec write - the ATA Device Properties under "General" state that the SSD is at Location 0 (Channel 0, Target 0, Lun 0) and it is ATA Channel 0 that is in PIO mode.

Open Disk management and Device Manager.

Right Click the Drive name (Ie Disk 0, Disk 1, CDROM 0, DVD ROM 01, etc)
Choose Properties, It will show you the Hardware Name and Address on the Main general Tab

(Location 0 (Channel 0, Target 0, Lun 0),

Location 0 = Means Local
Channel 0 = The SATA Channel its on.

Match that Channel with The Channel thats in PIO Mode in your Device Manager.




Goto Volumes.

From there it will tell you which partition is on the drive.