M5A97 MOBO Ram BSOD

[ender14]

Hi guys I did my first build a few weeks ago and I have been getting trouble ever since.

My setup is
M5A97 Motherboard
AMD 970 Phenom II
Corsair 8gb http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX34050

TLDR; My ram is on the QVL yet it is detecting it at 1333mhz instead of 1600mhz and on auto settings (1333mhz) it takes a few days before it BSOD and when I change the settings too 1600mhz and bump up the voltage and the CPU-nb voltage it blue screens in about 20 minutes. what should I do?

Now I used to have this kingston ram which was not on the QVL on the asus website and I got BSOD 3 ish times while installing windows and once I got it running it was BSOD in auto bios settings and setting the bios settings to 1.65 dimm voltage, changing the timings and the ram to 1600mhz. (it was auto detecting to 1333mhz).

Since I had no idea what I was doing I decided to just swap out the ram for a pair on the QVL on the asus website and be done with it. Now the ram I listed is on the Asus QVL however when I opened the motherboard manual and noticed there was a shorter QVL list in there, and it was NOT listed.

However this ram http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX31394 is listed. and I noted that it is the exact same ram except for 2 more 4gb sticks. But if 2 sticks isnt on the QVL why is 4 sticks.

Now after running 7 days with the ram on the auto settings (for some reason it auto detects to 1333mhz even though it is basically right there on the QVL for am3 cpu's) I got the BSOD after playing a few hours of HoN closing it then opening up google chrome a minute after.

I then tried setting the ram settings to 1600mhz, bumped up the DIMM voltage to 1.6v and changed the CPU-NB voltage up by .1v hoping that this would solve the problem as suggested by this thread http://www.gskill.us/forum/showthread.php?t=7688

I ended up getting 2 Blue screens in around 10 minutes the second of which was so bad my comp didnt auto restart I had to restart it manually.

I really have no idea what to do next. I think I might update my bios just because I see that my exact ram is on the new QVL but not exactly on the old one. But I heard updating bios is a pain and if I mess up (remember I'm really green to all of this) could really brick my system so I don't really want too.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what my next step should be?

 

[ender14]

Bump for me adding a TLDR, I would like to have this problem solved soon or else I'm going to exchange my ram (for a third time) and get a different set and just see if it works.

 

[ender14]

After doing more research for few hours, (added on to all of my previous research) it seems as though tightening the timings down to 8-8-8-24 might make my memory slightly slower but also be fail proof in preventing BSOD. I am unsure whether I should try tightening the timings or just swap out the ram for some 1333mhz which seems to be what the MOBO and CPU were meant to handle.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated!