thanks! that makes sense.
I ran aida64 stability test, prime95, memtest, cpu-z stress and bench, 3dmark timespy stress, everything passed with flying colors. excellent.
one interesting thing though, my 3dmark scores were a little lower, and the only variable that change was my 3200 cas 14 ram going to 3800 cas 16, but all the synthetic benches like aida64 latency test were better on 3800. weird. i'm leaving it at 3800 anyway. I lost about 700 points in timespy with that single variable change. doesn't make sense, but oh well