and the mushkin drive suddenly showed signs of failure in SMART, infact in under 200 hours, the drive went to 7% health and at 212 hours 0%. That was terrible. Mushkin sent a new drive without question in advance with my CC#. Great support!
Then I installed win7 x64 onto the P8Z68 by asus and it froze at 38% install, then 69% then at 0%. I updated the bios to the 3404 from the 3202. It didn't help, no setting did, even clearing the cmos did nothing. It seems that the drivers for the asus motherboard's sataIII and intel sata are needed or it will act crazy. sucks. I guess I could slipstream them in, but no. Instead I copied the drivers from the DVD onto an 8gb usb2 memory key and did the "load drivers" and found the floppy '64' install folders for both and windows installed to 100%.