I'm having the exact issue as stated above, narrowed it down to a power issue. I have a bid in on a power supply to see if that will fix it but I'm worried it's actually just a problem with the power delivery on the main board. Basically as soon as there is load on all 8 cores $@$* goes haywire. After a few seconds the core clocks drop randomly to 2.4ghz incurring a freeze at every transition, and there is near constant micro-stutter when games are attempted to be played.
Sucks because when it was running well, it was insane I was playing games nearly maxed out on an 8 year old machine... But it's not running well anymore and I think I need to give up and get a dedicated gaming PC.