Thanks, Sylvia.
Yeah, I had already seen it as a sort of omen to not fool with this cpu. I was more intrigued at how a system this advanced could not measure up to the utility's minimum specs and wondered whose fault it was. I'm guessing the fault lies with the MB itself. It has a quirk where on boot up it makes four rapid beeps then one correct beep and proceeds to load. Tech support says they have seen this from time to time with some of these boards and it's nothing to worry about. (?) LOL
I'm happy with the processor as it is. I thought it would be fun to see what I could get it up to, but wouldn't leave it there for any length of time anyway, as I too am more interested in longevity rather than ultimate speed. With my Cooler Master Hyper N520 cooling solution CoreTemp 0.99.8 shows an idle temp of around 28° for this processor, and that makes me happy.
Thanks again for all the help.
Arthur