Need some advice on what to do next

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Chriss

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Ok, so I thought I'd make a new topic seen as the other one was about Ram. Basically, I'm stuck.

PC which is Broken

Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P Intel P45 Socket 775 DDR2 Motherboard
Ram - OCZ 4GB (2x2048) DDR2 PC2-6400 800MHz Vista Performance Gold Edition
CPU - E8400
Graphics - Palit ATI Radeon HD4850 SONIC 512MB
HDD - 500gb Sata
OS - Vista Home Premium
PSU - OCZ PSU 500SXS StealthXStream 500W

My PC

Motherboard - P5E3 Premium
Ram - 4gb DDR3 (Mixed pairs)
CPU - E8500
Graphics - 8800GTS 640mb
PSU - Jeantech Storm 700W
OS - Windows 7 Pro

Story from the beginning.

Made his PC. Turned on fine, but artifacts on screen at boot. Swap graphics card with my PC. Works fine. Also tried installing windows, but noticed it was slow installing at this point, so stopped.

Replaced graphics card, worked fine. (Still slow installing). I was told that sometimes on boot there were artifacts, but turning it off sorted the problem.

PC Bluescreened. Tested ram. Wouldn't boot with one of the modules. Replaced that (It seemed a bit strange at this point, 2 parts going in a few months)

Ram came back. It boots with both sticks, however there are aftifacts. I have tried,

1. Checking with both modules of ram - No Luck
2. Changed power supply with mine, seemed to work with a few boots and no artifacting, so thought it was that.
3. Bought a PSU tester to be sure, says theres no fault with the his PSU.
4. Move the Graphics card into my PC, with my power supply, and for some reason, now artifacting. Now this really confused me, because my PSU didn't seem to cause the problem before.
5. Moved graphics card back into his PC, Tried using VGA output on graphics card. Now this, strangely worked for a few boots, but now doesn't.

And thats where I am now. I could try moving my PSU to his PC again to see what happens. The strange thing is, it seems to start off fine, for example, when I brought the PC back to mine, it was fine for the first boot. And now artifacts. Just like it was fine for the first few boots with the VGA cable.

As I said in the other thread, I've never had this much trouble before. Before I send anything off, I need to be sure that its it, as I'm already feeling bad for sending two things back to the same company for replacement. Any Ideas?

Thanks
 
artifacting is a graphics issue.

check your card for sufficient power, ensure it is NOT overclocked and is cooling sufficiently.
ensure ram is compatible. RTFM.
check to see you have the correct graphics drivers.
 
I suggest that you try diagnosing using elimination. First just put in the bare essentials needed for the system to start up. Slowly keep adding components one by one till the problem reappears. That way you can determine what's causing the strange issue.
 
Thanks for the response guys.

Going to see if I can determine it using elimination then. Also, about checking if the graphics card has enough power. Is his power supply enough?
 
Power Supply

Just looking around in the bios for things. Voltages are -

DDR18V - 1.904
+3.3V - 3.28
+12V - 12.239

Any of those out of ordinary?

Edit - Just manually set voltage to 1.8 for the Ram, it seems to have booted into windows with no artifacts. Going to do a quick memtest while I can actually see something.
 
Ok, well it seems to be just the ram settings then, which is good. Just 1 2gb kit works fine, but 2x4gb seems to be causing a bit of trouble. Its running memtest atm, which is going ok. If this does work out, just making sure is it safe to leave the voltages for the MCH at 1.3v and Ram at 2.0v? The ram is OCZ2G8004GK.
 
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