After some arduous hours testing and fiddling, I have found my ram has not degraded. It was my cpu not being stable and causing the crashes, and some of the secondary timings when left on auto were too tight for high MHz stability. I am 20 passes of linpack (Intel Burn Test) stable now @ specs in sig.

I actually booted at DDR1333 Mhz at 2.24v (nowhere near stable obviously) so my sticks can do high freq very well it seems, my board just has a massive hole between 1199 and 1277 MHz where it refuses to boot.