OK I'm good! I went through the settings one by one. Everything on the "OC Tweaker" page doesn't matter for my downclocking problem, so I left those settings like Ket's overclock screenshots. What did make a difference were the "CPU Configuration" settings under "Advanced". Basically, I had to enable all the States on this page - Enhanced, CPU3, CPU6 on enabled, and Package C on Auto. When I enabled only Enhanced Halt State, the processor would clock down to 1.6GHz in idle, but ocassionally spike up to 4.4 again. So I enabled all the states, but I left Thermal Throttling disabled because it seems some folks have issues with this one.

Here is my hardware for the record: ASRock Z68 Extreme4 board, i7 2600k CPU with a Corsair H60 cooler, 8GB Corsair Vengeance RAM, ASUS Matrix GTX580 graphics, Corsair Force 3 120GB SSD (which has issues, but Corsair is dealing with it), WD Caviar Black 1TB HDD, Corsair HX 1050Watt PSU, and Windows 7 Pro 64bit.

And I have two more questions I've been googling this for a while and no luck - my USB speeds are terrible. I plug in my USB key or external hard drive into either USB2 or USB3 and the transfer speed is pathetic. I got Windows 7 Pro 64bit, the latest drivers from ASRock. Some people said to disable legacy USB support. In the UEFI I went into Advanced>USB Settings and disabled USB Legacy Support, but then my keyboard and mouse don't work :s The only USB devices I have are the mouse and keyboard, and a printer. My speeds were fine on my old machine, also under Windows 7. Is there anything specific maybe to the ASRock Z68 boards or USB controllers?

Second one is about overclocking - I got to 4.4GHz relatively easily, but I'm still testing stability. Currently I'm giving it 1.320mV. I cannot get to 4.5GHz though - the machine won't even go into UEFI when I switch to a 45 multiplier and I have to shut down several times (or reset the board with that CMOS button) before I can actually get the ASRock splash screen and restore UEFI settings. The most Vcore I dared set was 1.390 because I thought it was unusual that 4.4 was OK and then 4.5 boom. I'm happy with 4.4GHz and before I start playing with the settings again, I wanted to ask if it's possible that my chip just hits a hard wall at 4.4 and I should make my peace with it?