I've never heard of an M1 stepping. I believe C1 is correct. Do you have your chip overclocked or do you have speed step (Intel EIST) enabled? At stock settings, cpu-z should be reporting vCore below your VID. Note that Speedstep / EIST can cause an incorrect VID reading (reporting a VID that's too low.) If you suspect this is the case, turn off Speedstep and read the VID again. Unfortunately, I don't have a comparative basis at the moment as I haven't read up on Q9300 chips.