had a system in which was experiencing random BSODs, mainly during gaming, as well as sometimes the display reverting to very low resolution modes.
i checked the system logs and the wide variety of STOP codes suggested none of them were individually worth pursuing, and that there was likely a hardware (memory) problem.
i ran some memory tests for a few hours and they came up clean, but then some internet research found an interesting quote from the MSI website (it was an MSI motherboard) that said that the default memory timings might be too aggressive and could result in an unstable system. they actually expect you to manually underclock the RAM just to get a working system!
i found this a little odd, so went to investigate the DRAM settings in the BIOS, and that's when i noticed the default clock speed for the RAM was 200mhz, the correct setting for DDR400 RAM, but the machine was only fitted with DDR333. the correct clock speed for this is 167mhz. so i adjusted the setting, and the BSODs were gone.
there still remained a problem with the displays reverting to extremely low resolutions. this was caused by a lack of power - there was only a 450w PSU powering a dual-core 64-bit processor, 2gb of RAM, several optical and hard drives, and 2 nvidia graphics cards in SLI configuration.
the problem with the displays going bad was interesting, but then i noticed that there was only a 450w power supply, powering a 64-bit dual core system with 2gb ram, several drives, and 2 nvidia graphics cards in SLI configuration. upgrading this to a 750w corsair PSU solved that problem.
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