ASUS Striker II Extreme

[Appelsap]

Well, I'm freaking out here. No overclocking, restored the system - inserted two new drives - and it was running nicely for a day or two. But then... this evening I was installing XP mode in Win7 when it BSODed on me again, just as it was shutting down to restart after a successfull install. After restarting, Win7 wouldn't load so I booted up XP from a different drive and made sure every drive was still there and the data accessible. Just to be safe made a few extra backups. Rebooted again, two drives no longer listed in bios, rebooted again, all drives gone. Disconnected power for a minute, cleared CMOS and rebooted, one drive recognized again, but not the others. Took all the drives out, connected them to a different PC altogether, they all show. Weird, this is really weird.

Now here's my predicament: I don't really want to spend too much money on getting everything working again, but I cannot have the system crashing on me like this. So I see two options:
- replace the mobo with a new S2E and replace the mem (just to be safe) and pray my problems are gone. This way I can keep the QX9650 and my watercooling stuff, all my installs will work and it's not as expensive as buying an entire system. Downside is I can't be sure the problem will be solved (it could return if it's the chipset somehow freaking out with Spinpoints, though others should then have had the same problem, and I haven't found any reference to that);
- buy a new SLI Core i7 mobo and Core i7. Chances of not having the same 'disappearing drives' problem almost 100%, and creates room for upgrades. Downsides here a plenty: more expensive, and the reasonably priced cpu's are hardly worth the performance upgrade (920 doesn't do much better than the 9650), plus I then need new WC blocks for the CPU and mobo as well and will have to reinstall all my OSes.

Well, I appreciate any thoughts anyone has on this, be it cause or sollution.