So I went back to The Chip Merchant to exchange my RAM. The guy said that it was unlikely that both RAM modules were bad and went off to talk to his tech.He came back and said that my report of bad RAM wasn’t the first and there appears to be an issue with the combination of RAM, motherboard, and processor they sold me, so they gave me a different type of RAM and told me that the DDR 400 could only operate at 333, but the BIOS’s setting of Auto should detect it. I popped the RAM in, set the BIOS to a RAM frequency of 333 and will cross my fingers. It only took me a few days of futzing around to come to the same conclusion.