Is it Win 8.1 or motherboard?

Building a systems for grandson, using Gigabyte GA-H81M-HD3 mobo, i3-4160, 8Gb GSKill DRR3-1600, Kingston SSD Now 120Gb, WD 500Gb HDD, LG DVD burner, GTX750Ti.
System just locks up sometimes within a minute, sometimes it'll run for 10 min. Doesn't seem to be CPU heat related as it stays around 34c. Have swapped out every item (SSD, HDD, DVD/RW, memory, vid card, psu and it still does it.

Today I have had it running the PartedMagic OS (whatever version of Linux it runs, the PartedMagic CD is one I bought in March) for an hour now streaming YouTube videos while I ran gParted to re-setup the SSD and no freeze ups. What was odd when I went to copy the Gigabyte driver CD to the HDD it gave me some error bout the ntfs file system being unsound or something and wouldn't let me copy the files from the CD to the HDD. Ran gParted and re-did the partition and format then the files copied over just fine. So it seems all the hardware is operating correctly as using the net, video, audio and accessing all the drives simultaneously should be a decent test.

Then I ran the 8.1 install again (purchased & downloaded from MS) and same issue- Win 8.1 will install but never seems to make it through the setup all the way, sometimes freezes when I'm inputting computer or user name. Then after a few failed restarts (the reset button never works during this BTW, have to hard reset) I get prompts to run repairs, etc and after a couple of those get errors about the boot mgr being bad, etc. Run the bootrec commands but they don't fix it. Have the BIOS set to Legacy instead of UEFI.

The frustrating part is the day before I had built a system with ALL the exact same parts, partitioned the SSD & HDD with gParted, left the BIOS set just for Other OS, popped in the Win 8.1 DVD and away we went.

So Win 8.1? Motherboard? I do have another of the same motherboard coming tomorrow.

Sam

 

Are you using the Legacy BIOS or the UEFI BIOS? Your install media, is it a hard copy or digital copy?

To me it sounds like the install media is corrupted or bad?

Note: I would seriously consider upgrading that CPU to a 4 core. I retract that statement as I see it has hyperthreading....so 2 virtual cores for a total of 4.

 

[QTE="bassfisher6522, post: 10804, member: 258"]Are you using the Legacy BIOS or the UEFI BIOS? Your install media, is it a hard copy or digital copy?

To me it sounds like the install media is corrupted or bad?

Note: I would seriously consider upgrading that CPU to a 4 core. I retract that statement as I see it has hyperthreading....so 2 virtual cores for a total of 4.[/QUOTE]


as I posted, legacy bios. it does the same thing using 2 different media- a retail win 8 upgrade DVD and a win 8.1 I purchased & downloaded from MS. total wipe of ssd on every time I do the install.

sam