the one here was running the original firmware, probably factory original from asus. the board was on a 'performance' preset setting--and defaulted to that when i tried a bios reset to defaults. when i updated the firmware, that setting changed to a 'normal' one when i reset to defaults again.

i didn't really dig into that too much because i knew it was already an rma case, but i think part of it had to do with boosted power draw. it still crashed on 'normal' and that's what it was set on when i ran intel's diagnostics (which took a few tries just to have it not crash before finishing with a result).