I appreciate your help, I know this isn't really a hardware forum but I haven't been able to solve the issue.
I ran memtest with each stick of ram individually with everything else disconnected from the mb, each stick passed. I tried two sticks at once, they both passed. I tried all four sticks, and the system crashed. Thinking it might be some faulty slots on the mb, I tried the parity sync with just the two sticks in that passed memtest together, and it crashed. I tried swapping out the power supply, still crashed.
I guess it comes down to the motherboard or the cpu - is there a way to test either to avoid exchanging/swapping them out ?