Well it appears that my DFI 790FX-M2R board wasn't the problem.

Newegg RMA'ed it... but since they had none in stock they just refunded the money and sent me an e-mail. I found a local store that had the Gigabyte MA790FX-DS5 in stock for a reasonable price so I picked it up. It has the same boot problem... with 2 different sets of ram. (And the ram works in another machine so we know it's not ram.)

SO it looks like using Sandra blew the CPU up. But it was probably just a coincidence that it blew up while I happened to be running a test in Sandra.

The 9850 will go off for RMA. Luckily I ordered an AM2 CPU to have on hand "just in case". I should get it tomorrow. I'll wait on sending the Phenom off until I see this MB and memory working with the temporary CPU. (I guess it could still be the memory... even though it works in another machine.)

DANG IT. I liked the DFI 790FX-M2R better than this Gigabyte. (I like the LED POST display, and it has a better sound card.)

Oh well.