thank you. sorry for the very delayed response.. i fell asleep while running memtest last night and had a busy day today. individually, each of the sticks in slot one were error free after three passes each. running them together in slots 1 and 3 resulted in literally several thousand errors within a minute of running memtest, regardless of which stick of memory was in which slot (1 or 3). running memtest using individual sticks in slot 3 also produced a ton of errors, but that was when i was falling asleep so i can't really be specific as to how many errors with just slot 3 being tested.
 
attempting to use slots 2 and 4, either individually or with both sticks at the same time, resulted in the monitor not displaying anything. it was turned on but the screen just stayed blank. i'm not sure why that would be other than knowing slots 1 and 3 should generally be filled before 2 and 4?
 
those results were all using the BIOS settings that you suggested changing last night and i haven't made any further changes since i just haven't had the time yet. my assumption based on those results is that it's almost certainly a problem with slot 3. would you recommend still trying to increase the voltage settings just in case, or would it just be a waste of time?
 
good news is that i have not had any issues running just one 8gb stick so far. i haven't had the time to play around with the pc much today or stress test it while gaming but no random restarts, blue screens or windows errors since. thank you very much for the help