Quick feedback on this. I thought about failures in computers in the past, and realized that RAM degradation has been #1 on my list. I ended up getting 32GB of 2133 RAM (max capacity/speed that the MB can take now), and found out something interesting. With 8GB, the RAM rarely exceeded 50%, even with the pagefile disabled, so I was rather shocked to test the new RAM in a situation that I know was 50% in the old setup... and I got it to peak around 7GB. So, I am rather confused as to how Win7 is managing RAM when I can consistently get it over 6GB now, but before it was always saying 4GB(ish).
Anyway, wanted to throw that out there. 16GB would be fine, but the 8GB is definitely in the "not recommended" category.
As an aside... I benchmarked the machine and recouped all of the previous speed lost over time, but the SSD is still temperamental to the heat from massive read/write operations. I have always gotten around this by downloading to an HDD, and then installing from that (just massive writes seem to be fine for it). I also found the GTX 970 can definitely "hold its own" even though it is installed in a PCIe 2.0 slot (in benched very nicely against the GTX 980s in PCIe 3.0 slots).
Bottom line - RAM degradation, especially when RAM is limited, is something to bear in mind as a machine ages. Memtest never showed anything, but spurious BSODs are a good indicator. The new RAM had a "hard faults" of zero in several situations, so I will ride this machine out until I can truly kill it.
post edited by mettelus - 2016/07/10 17:16:14