At a total loss - Need help troubleshooting Asus H87M-PRO build!

[Proxy]

Well, I've been at it for a few days now. Been building machines for the better part of 15 years, and have NEVER had a machine give me the kind of grief this one is. This was going to be my file server, and dedicated streaming rig.

Machine specs:

• Asus H87M-PRO
• i7-4770 (Cooled with a Noctua cooler) @ Stock
• x4 2GB Corsair DIMMS (8GB total) @ Stock
• nVidia GT 610
• Elgato HD 60 Pro capture card
• Samsung SSD
• Western Digital Blue (Storage)

Issue:

I first built the machine this past weekend. Installed W8.1 off of a USB stick. Once I started installing the drivers, when I got to the nVidia drivers, the machine would either hard-lock, or power-cycle itself. I figured there was an issue with the particular drivers I was trying to install, and tried three other versions. I was finally able to install all drivers, chipset, etc. Then did my usual overnight burn-in test I do will all new machines, I let AIDA64 run through the night to stress the CPU, and RAM.

I woke up to the system humming along. At this point I figured it was stable. I started installing all the programs I needed to use, and configuring them. Then in the middle of setting up OBS, bam! The system power-cycles itself. It would go on to continue to power-cycle, or hard-lock, causing me to hit the reset button.

I get it back onto the desktop, and the first thing I always do when systems start acting up is check the Event Logs. No memory dump, and a generic system power loss. One thing I did find interesting, is that with each log entry right before the "critical", or "error", there was always a "warning" that said, "The driver \Driver\WUDFRd failed to load for the device ACPI\PNP0A0A\2&daba3ff&2". Everytime. I Googled that error up, and down, and there were no consistent results.

I started trying different things, such as updating the BIOS. Now at this point I feel I should mention, I overnighted another H87M-Pro, because originally when I first started seeing issues, I thought I had a bad board. So I was going to RMA one, build with the new one, and when I got the RMA back, sell it. I had the EXACT same issue with BOTH boards, and multiple different BIOS versions. After reformatting a few times, the system seems to be getting worse, now I can't even finish installing Windows 7, or 8.1 without the system hard-locking in the middle of the install! Yet, I can it can, and just did, sit next to me for over an hour running memtest86+ with no issue. Then I go to install the OS again, and BAM, hard-lock. I'm all out of ideas. I'm turning it over the [H].

Conclusion:
This machine is acting worse than a troubled child on crack. Maybe a sledge hammer will work...

 

[defaultluser]

Did you try running without the GT 610, and uninstall the nvidia drivers? It's kinda pointless in your build.

 

[Master_shake_]

Did you try running without the GT 610, and uninstall the nvidia drivers? It's kinda pointless in your build.

this... unless for some reason you are using the nvidia card for encoding.

 

[Proxy]

Did you try running without the GT 610, and uninstall the nvidia drivers? It's kinda pointless in your build.

this... unless for some reason you are using the nvidia card for encoding.

Thanks for the responses guys. That is a detail I left out of the OP by mistake; yes I did try it running the iGPU. On the first board the problem was somehow worse with the Intel GPU. When the system would hard-lock the screen would artifact first. The second board didn't artifact, but it still hard-locked, and would power-cycle itself. I also disabled the "fast startup" feature in W8.1, as I read that was causing other people's systems to randomly power-cycle when they went into sleep mode from being idle. This did not fix the issue.