I've recently purchased a new computer (more or less). I bought a new hard drive (250 GB IDE), followed a week or two later by a whole bunch of components:

• New Case (better cooling)
• New power supply
• New motherboard (new, should be more stable vs old, right?)
  • Asus M2N-E : Nforce 570 Ultra chipset
• cpu, ram... (to go with the board): AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Socket AM2

      2x DDRII-DIMM 512MB
      PC2-5400 CL=5-5-5-15
  

I'm using someone else's PCI Geforce card for display during setup and testing (it was to be a server, and take up the some of my remaining old drives from another server).

It doesn't work.

In another machine, I have managed to make a small boot partition, and an 11 GB root partition. I've unpacked a gentoo stage3 tarball, and portage tree. Installed grub, a 2.6.16 kernel I built on a friend's machine. I have had this install boot fine in another machine...

However, moving to this new machine:

• It fails kernel compilation (random gcc error). Usually fails within a minute or so of starting make.
• It also fails (sometimes) if I tar the kernel source and then try compressing it.
• I have tried (kernel compile) with only half the memory... Tried the other half...
• I have tried "noapic pci=noacpi nousb noload=nv_sata".
• I have tried a kernel with or without "AMD and nVidia IDE support".
• I have tried disabling unmask irq with hdparm.
• I have an external (usb 2.0) DVD+-RW drive that I have connected some of the time, and booting off of various bootdisks results in similar problems sometimes. Sometimes it won't even finish booting (depending on the disc).

Diagnostics that did not see errors:

• Memtest86 has run overnight without errors.
• I have tried running cpuburn (burnK7 and burnMMX .. at least for 20 minutes each (maybe I should run it longer?)) No errors detected by that..

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Later, I did some tests, and it was failing memtest whenever I plugged an IDE drive in or had ram in slot 3 (?).

I RMA'ed the motherboard, and got a temporary replacement board (to later go into a new desktop machine). This new board works fine with the memory, drive, etc. (I re-installed anyways to avoid anything left-over from earlier corruption).

When I got the replacement board back, I installed it in that new case and tested it with memtest. Memtest reported lots of errors until I underclocked the memory down to 533 Mhz. It seems to work fine at 533 Mhz.