Well... I talked to a Asus motherboard tech last night... he said certain OEM motherboards have features disabled so it is possible that even though I have a two identical motherboards one will run the Phenom 2 chips and another might not. ( !!!!!! ) He also thought my retail board was not burnt up but had a grounding issue.... to remove it from the case ( has been ) and try to run it on top of a piece of cardboard. WOW..... I will try that for what it's worth and I hope he is right. But........ I wonder how they disable features ??? I would have thought it would be in the bios hidden from view as it were, but I tried to boot up the OEM board with the bios chip from my retail board and still no luck... wonder if there is a hidden jumper somewhere I can find. Anyone run into this before ??