Nvidia: were they sent here by the devil?

[Ankhwatcher]

General Techies: Years ago you served myself in Build Wars, now I beg you to help me in my struggle against the bluescreens.

Okay, that Star Wars references is tortured enough.

A few years ago I built a system with and XFX 780i (Nvidia SLi) motherboard and two 9800GTX's.
Since then it has performed steadily worse all the time.

Running Vista Ultimate x64 it crashed constantly until I swapped out two of its RAM cards for 2 GB ones (taking it up to 6 GB) then the crashing stopped.
Until I installed Windows 7 Ultimate x64 and the crashing started again, mostly with memory management issues.
I abandoned RAID 0 as it had problems accessing it and took out one of the hard drives, which it had problems reading to.
The machine decided it didn't like having two graphics cards so I took one of those out.

I reseated the ram, reinstalled and did everything I could.

This week I unplugged everything from the motherboard, cleaned the whole case out and carefully plugged it all back in. I recreated my RAID 0 partition and reinstalled windows 7 on it. It won't even let me log in without crashing.

I've had it.
This computer has had problems alleging to come from its:
hard drives
ram
cd-rom
floppy
graphics cards
usb mouse
and printer

I'm calling bullshit. I think the motherboard is what's broken.

So what I need to know is: what motherboard can I replace it with.

Can I still run my two graphics cards if the MoBo isn't SLi?
I've come to really hate nforce over the years and I would like to leave it behind. But I'm stuck with 9800GTX's and DDR2 ram.

Suggestions?

[sswilson]

You can run two cards, but you won't be able to run them in SLI.

What processor are you currently running?

[Ankhwatcher]

Intel Q9450

My original system specs are still in my signature here.

If the graphics cards are not in SLi what do they do?

[jcmaz]

Physics

[sswilson]

Just gives you the ability to run the extra monitors.

There are driver hacks out there which allow SLI on non-Nvidia chipsets, but that's a pita.

[Arinoth]

Have you actually run memtest on any of your ram. Your initial sticks could have been defective and whenever it addressed a bad address on the ram you would blue screen.

[Ankhwatcher]

Yeah, I gave it a go. It never found anything.
I'll run 'em again now.

[Ankhwatcher]

Originally Posted by Ankhwatcher

Yeah, I gave it a go. It never found anything.
I'll run 'em again now.

I'm running the Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool in Basic Mode.

[stoanee]

Originally Posted by Ankhwatcher

I'm running the Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool in Basic Mode.

I thought the 780 was a POS, I suspect mobo problems. The Q9450 is a good chip and should serve you well if you can get it working properly.

[Ankhwatcher]

Originally Posted by stoanee

I thought the 780 was a POS, I suspect mobo problems. The Q9450 is a good chip and should serve you well if you can get it working properly.

Yeah, I'm right there with you.