Pulled "bad" ram and now it won't post

[SithSolo1]

Windows has been crashing a bit lately so I decided to run memtest last night. After about 10.5 hrs I had over 1000 errors in a 100mb section of the 2nd stick. This afternoon I pulled* the stick and kablamo the whole system is hosed.

System:
i7-4770k
Asrock z87e-itx
Crucial Ballistix VLP 8GB x 2 (one presumed defective)
Mushkin mSATA w/ Win 8.1 Pro
R9 290

The system has been run at stock speeds since it was assembled about 4 months ago.

All the fans spin up and run as normal but there is no video output from either the iGPU or the dGPU. None of my usb devices (kb, mosue, etc) light up. Pressing the CMOS reset button on the I/O panel did reset the fan profiles to stock so I assume it reset the bios. I re-inserted the ram but same results.

So I put in a speaker and I get 3 long beeps repeating when it trys to boot. Started stripping out hardware one piece at a time until I was down to the PSU, CPU, cpu fan, and the msata. At this point I think its the cpu, I'm gonna re-seat it and report back but I'm open to ideas in the meantime.

*Before pulling the ram I unplugged the power and touched the frame of the case in the hopes of discharging any static.

 

[SithSolo1]

After re-seating the cpu the system appears to be working normally. Weird.

 

[mayonaise 812]

Glad nothing else is defective. Knock on wood.