System keeps falling over.

Some background info.
System specs:

Mb, gigabyte h67n-usb3-b3
Cpu, core i5 intel
Ram, gskill ripjaws, F3-10666cl7d 8gb (2x4)
Psu, Aereon asroc asc-700c 700w
Gfx, radeon hd6850 1gb
Case, nzxt h2
Samsung 830 128gb ssd (c drive)

About a month ago i had a win 8 update (im running 64bit), upon reboot the system got to bios splash screen but no further. Im not sure what the correct term is for when a pc gives up, its like u hit the power button and all fans stop etc, i call it 'falling over', maybe u can educate me to the correct term. Anyways it would do this, get to bios splash screen, no further and fall over, then restart by itself caught in an endless loop.
Hitting f12 with the wirless keyboard was erratic in success, a wired keyboard was more relaible.
I would enter the bios and manually set boot drive and all was fine, it would then load win 8, and as long as i didnt reboot no problems occured.

Then last sunday i gave the machine a shutdown for a couple of hours, upon restart it didnt even get to bios splash screen, it just fell over (without restart cycle).
My first thought was psu fault, so i happened to have a spare one lying around, albeit only 500w i tried but alas it was failing same point 1-3 secs into boot (pre bios splash screen).

I then stripped all peripherals out of the motherboard/case so only what was connected to the motherboard was psu, wired keyboard, monitor' ram and c drive (gfx card not connected).
This helped sumwhat in that i was able to get further into the system but it still fell over, even if i managed to get into bios and think about what i might try and do, it was like i was on a timer and it randomly would fall over, sumtimes 5 secs into bios, other times 30 secs.
I tried lots of other little tricks like triggering cmos rest via screwdriver (which actually triggered the pc to switch on, is that normal?), pulling the bios battery out for several hours and reinsrt, nuthing worked.

So after a little googling and reading, most views were that it was mb issue.

So i bought a new mb as i wasn't particularly satisfied with having only 4 sata points and one pcie slot anyway.
Now i am running a Asrock h77 pro4-m with all of the above specs.
It was my second attempt at building a pc but upon booting up everything seemed to work, no falling over. I couldnt 'see' all my hdd (i have more than listed in the system specs, ie data drives) but not all were showing, but at this time i wasnt overly concrened about that, just getting my machine up and running for now.
But it seemed as tho the preinstallation of win 8 from the old mb wasnt playing to nicely with this mb, CCC for example wasnt opening, sum usb ports seemed to work sumtimes and other times not, then i got a usb power surge error.

I decided to reinstall a fresh clean installation of win 8 to start off on the right foot with this new mb. I formatted the c drive but the system reserved partition remianined i think.
Upon reinstall i noticed somethings stayed, sumhow my background wallpaper of choice remained could the system reserve partiion on drive c retain this info?

I had only reinstalled a couple of programs (MS Office and ff, skype) when i was asked for an adobe flash update, during which the system fell over again.

Uh oh i thought... Here we go again, and right enough it starts falling over again and again. It fell over during a Pc Refresh, and now its falling over so badly that i cannot even stay alive long enough to out a new operating system (was going to try win 7, but it falls over during very early loading of disc etc).

I even managed to do a WDM Tool prior to an attempt of win 7 installation, it did 6 passes no errors.

Im at a loss now, im thinking faulty psu or cpu. Mb is brandnew and the ram passed (just one) mem test, but i have run out of components to play with at home, think i will have to send it to the local pc repair shop.

With this information, does anything stand out as to what the culprit is? I have already spent $100 on the mb, and whilst i dont rate that as a waste of money as it has more features i like/want, i can't keep shelling out $$ on random parts till i find the culprit.

Plz forgive typing errors etc, im on the ipad <groan>

BruceBanner said:

Some background info. I decided to reinstall a fresh clean installation of win 8 to start off on the right foot with this new mb. I formatted the c drive but the system reserved partition remianined i think.
Upon reinstall i noticed somethings stayed, sumhow my background wallpaper of choice remained could the system reserve partiion on drive c retain this info?

I had only reinstalled a couple of programs (MS Office and ff, skype) when i was asked for an adobe flash update, during which the system fell over again.

Click to expand...

I can understand your frustration. I am not a big expert on DIY rigs, although I am pretty competent at building them and getting them to work (see System Specs). Expert or not here is what I would do at this point given the limited amount I know about your mobo, etc. WRT to Flash, don't install an update at this time. Win8 likes the one it installs. On the clean install, I would start over making sure that you have only one partition. Use the partition feature on your install DVD. Before reinstalling, you could try repairing start up with your DVD, but I'd go for a complete do over. It doesn't take that long anyway. Once you have done the do over run the Win 8 upgrade assistant to see if it picks up any problems. Once you reconnect your hardware (including only 4 GB RAM for now) run it again. I was able to run the assistant without installing it. I didn't see the link to do so, but you could look around if you don't want to install the assistant.

Have a friend that uses a Core i5 CPU? Try put your i5 to your friends Motherboard (To Check for CPU Faults).
Background Wallpaper remain after clean install is because your Microsoft Account backup of Settings.