Z77X-UD3H artifacting and system hangs

[stryke297]

In the past several months I have purchased and assembled a new build. The parts include:
PSU: Apevia 680 W Iceberg or Offbrand 700 W
Motherboard Gigabyte Z77x-UD3H Rev. 1 BIOS version F17 (updated by manufacturer)
CPU: Intel i5 3570K
RAM: Corsair Value Select 4GBx1 DDR3 Model #: CMV4GX3M1A1333C9
HDD: Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 1TB x2
Graphics: EVGA 550ti 2gb 192 bit ddr5
NIC-link 54g wireless
mouse: logitech mx518
keyboard: saitek II eclipse

Upon installing Win7 or Vista the computer will run fine in safe mode, and with default drivers. If I install most windows updates, or if I update the graphics driver(for card or integrated) upon rebooting I will receive an artifact and subsequent system hang at the windows 7 loading screen, and with my GPU it will system hang shortly after desktop.

I just recently tried installing Win 8 and at some point during the install I get a message like"there was an unexpected restart during your installation. To continue the installation press OK, restart and try the installation again."

Again, things run flawlessly before I do any updates, and in safe mode (post updates).

I've spent a lot of time trying to solve this, and am pretty extensively exhausted in what to try. I've tried resetting everything. I've tried several other HDDs. I tried another PSU, I've ran memtest for 28 passes with no errors. I ran prime 95 on 5 different tests for 16+ hours no errors. I had the motherboard RMA'd(I don't actually know if they found anything, but they updated BIOS to f17 and they sent it back so IDK I guess it's fine). I've tried two different GPU's and integrated graphics. I've tried booting up with no USB devices plugged in.

I'm sure I'm trying clean installs. I've tried resetting CMOS/removing battery from mobo. I've reseated everything. Besides the fact that I've tested everything, and tried additional hardware, nothing looks damaged.

I'm not sure if my BIOS settings are right, but I've tried optimized defaults. I did manually set the timings for my RAM instead of AUTO. I did increase the clock for my cpu to 100.10 because I read that being a solution for a similar problem. None of these things have worked. Open to suggestions/comments.

[wazza300]

what dram and cpu vtt did you test with?

[SnakeHaveYou]

Similar problem here..