Please help me troubleshoot new computer

[smmorrison]

Ok...I need some help.
I've always built my own computers, dating back to my celeron 400(a)...

I just put together my first multiple core build

Please note I am a professional photographer and this will be my editing machine so I need absolute stability more than anything

Vista Home premium 64bit
intel e7200 stock fan/cooler
asus p5q
8gig gskill ram
2x WD 640gig drives
antec sonata 500 with the power supply that came with it
currently have an old geforce 6#### express as the video card as I had it lying around

everything started up ok, updated windows yada yada yada

ran memtest on the ram and no errors

I started noticing errors when I downloaded files from the internet...
for example abiword would give a file corrupted error every time I tried to download and install

quicktime installer would do the same
open office...same
avg would download but give an error when it tried to update
antivir would have multiple 'errors' on self extraction

at first I thought it was a Network card problem...I figured the onboard lan was the culprit

however, I downloaded a couple of the same apps on my other machine, tested them, worked ok and then put them on the Vista machine and I got errors

however some worked on the vista machine, it wasn't a 100% repeatable error

I then went ahead and did a clean install of vista on the 2nd hard drive, thinking maybe it was the hard drive....didn't fix anything

I also tried taking out half the ram, then swapping in the other half...still got errors

The biggest problem I have found and the dealbreaker
I ingested 2000 photos from a wedding on sunday using photomechanic

it seemed to go ok, but then I went and looked at a few and maybe 10-20 of them are totally corrupted with strange artifacts and color banding...I checked the files on another machine and they are fine

soooo...something seems to be very wrong

any ideas

cpu? mobo? those would seem to be the only options I would think

could it be the ram? It made it through memtest just fine

I'm running a 2 hour prime95 torture test right now and we'll see if I get any errors

However...right now I simply can't trust the machine

I would really appreciate any advice or ideas anyone has

thanks

 

[z1ggy]

How long did you do memtest for? You need to pass it for like.. 18 or so. With prime95 run a mix test (ram/cpu) and make sure you can run stable for around 18h as well.

 

[smmorrison]

I did 5 #5 tests and 2 complete tests which is the suggestion in the memtest 'guide' in the CPU forum

I set prime95 to a 2 hour test

If I'm seeing such instability in my operating system, wouldn't they come up quickly in the stress tests?

 

[smmorrison]

something else strange...
I moved 34gb of image files from one partition to another partition on the same drive
it took about 9 minutes to transfer the files...isn't this extremely slow for a SATA file transfer on the same drive?

 

[smmorrison]

just finished a 9 hour sp2004 orthos blend test...no errors

any ideas??

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Have you updated to the latest 64bit driver for your NIC?

 

[smmorrison]

yes, all drivers are up to date

Im currently running a long memtest

its been going for 8 hours, no errors