RAM Issues After Installing New HDD

[Jtwehle]

Background

My PC (i5 4460 CPU, Gigabyte H97 Gaming 3 MoBo, 8GB RAM, GTX 550 Ti GPU) has been working flawlessly over the past two years I've had it. My hard drive was very old and noisy however so I wanted to replace it. After getting a brand new WD Blue 1TB HDD and installing a fresh copy of Windows 10 on it however, my computer started failing to turn on. I haven't changed or messed with any other components other than the new HDD, but every time I turned on my PC nothing would show up, just a black screen and occasionally it would turn on and off. I tried a bunch of stuff and was worried something in the PC was dead.

 

How I Kind of Fixed it but not Quite

Then, I tried booting with only one 4GB RAM stick in the RAM slots and my PC booted up just fine. After searching around in the BIOS I found my BIOS was auto detecting my RAM frequency as 13.33MHz, but my RAM is 16MHz. I changed this and my PC worked fine with the full 8GB of RAM in. However, now every time I restart my computer, it fails once, then reboots and tells me the RAM should be at 13.33MHz not 16MHz. If change it to what it wants the PC won't work. If I leave it alone it works but still does the same error next time I reboot.

 

Here's my questions:

Is my RAM going bad? Or my motherboard? And why was this triggered by replacing my HDD? Is there a fix for me to stop it from thinking the RAM needs to be 13.33MHz? I have turned off the auto detect function for RAM in the BIOS and this still hasn't done anything. Help would be much appreciated.

[kagarium]

If your bios settings keep getting reverted it may be a bad cmos battery (the little watch battery on your mobo) 

[Valkyrie Lenneth]

whenever ur bios resets to default u need to manually set ur ram timings to the proper timings, else it will boot in a standard default setting and those arent stable with all sticks

 

aka, reset to default wont help u, because u need to manually set timings either way

 

also a hdd cant really interfere with ram , probably the bios just reset the cas latencies