Hi everyone, and thank you all for taking the time to help. Love this community

And thanks for the great tips! All I needed to do was change the bios setting for the memory from auto to manual, and use the factory specs (which wasnt on the packaging, had to google it out. lol) for the timing, and it hasnt crashed once yet! *knock on wood* actually, with the memory changes, it's more stable now at 8 gig then it was at 6 gigs with auto settings. with the 6 gigs on auto, I still had random crashes about 5% of the time.

Left the computer on today to run some automated tasks, will see if it's stable when I get home. Thank you all again for the help and have a great day!

p.s. (on a sidenote, with this setup and symlinks, I'm running around shat very smoothly atm for a change. amazing difference and a relatively cheap system for only $800 also)