OK, I'm all confused now. Temperatures are back near normal again, although I do think a 1C change since updating to the 1303 BIOS revision is strange (core temp = ~44-45C ).

I've changed nothing, but I did notice while I was rummaging around in the BIOS that the VCore is 1.481V. I remember having read that the "stock" voltage for this cpu is 1.35V and it's range is 0.875-1.5V, hmm, . I manually set the voltage starting at 1.2V and raised it in 0.025...

Wow, looks like my temperatures are on the rise after this BIOS update. Coincidence? Maybe, but idk, but I kinda doubt it.

Get this, I started up my computer this morning and got tied up doing something else for about 3 hours. So it's idling, right? Should be about 43C like normal, right? WRONG!!! 55C CORE TEMPERATURE!!! ***!!!

It takes 10 minutes of all the fans full blast, including an external fan, to get everything down to what idle temperature was before....

Well what do you know? It worked. I went ahead and corrected my memory to 6-6-6-16 and then ran prime95 for 5.3hours with stable results. Things did get a little toasty at 59C on the core temperature and 55-56C on the CPU.

I still don't know why they are different, on my laptop it seems to be consistently within 1C across the board (although it does have an Intel cpu and not an AMD) , but I do I expect from getting a Dell, almost every single cpu they offer is an Intel....