AMD FX 4170 and possible issues

[Street Spirit]

I've got the AMD FX quad with 16 gigs of ddr3 1866 ram (4 4 gig sticks) on the Gigabyte GA-990XA-ud3 mobo. I've heard about people having issues with the 8 core and 4 sticks of ram (that it just keeps setting back to 1333 and whatnot), so my question is, has the quad been having some issues of it's own with running 4 sticks of ram?

Gigabyte has alot of different versions of bios that I can flash my mobo with, I haven't done it yet since I got my FX cpu because I'm not really sure which one to go with. The system volume on my hard drive has gotten corrupted multiple times and some games at what looks like 5 frames a second, so I'm not sure if it's a bios issue, a ram issue, a hard drive issue or all of the above.

I've only been building my own pc's for about a year and a half now, so bear with me :)

[Acebmxer]

Hello and welcome to TT forums.

As for your cpu / memory / bios question, it is recommended that you flash to the latest version for your board. The latest version is going to contain the fixes/patched from the previous versions.

Also any cpu AMD or Intel will always overclock (cpu or memory) better with only 2 sticks of ram vs. 4 sticks. Anything over 1066 or 1333 is technically overclocking so some tweaking is going to be needed. Another thing not all cpu's or memory are the same so what you may see what someones cpu can do does not necessarily mean your will do it also.