I was very careful to follow the instructions of the mobo manual. Starting at the slot closest to the CPU, there's a blue slot, then black, then it alternates twice after that. I only have RAM in the black slots.
Yeah. Thats correct for an i7 board.
It certainly is possible that I have the timings off. I'm not very familiar with what I should be using.
The auto settings should be fine. I was wondering whether you had changed anything.
Can anyone look at the link I provided for my RAM in the first post and tell me if there's anything non-standard about it? I just ordered a moderately priced set of RAM that I thought would work well.
The RAM you bought looks fine to me. Run
CPU-Z and see what the detected timings are?