I ran the Intel Diagnostic Tool before posting here, but I ran it again. The processor passes those tests.

I can leave the system idle and whenever a background process runs the cpu fans will spin up.

I have plenty of fans and good airflow: the case has 2 intake and one exhaust fan and I have 2 fans on the cpu heatsink- noctua nh-d15.

I have changed motherboard settings to defaults, RAM to DDR-2133. It did not make a difference. The RAM runs @1.2v at either DDR-2133 or DDR-2666.

I can't afford to go buy another motherboard or processor to test right now, so I have no option at the moment.

The individual core temps jump an immediate 25 degrees (up to 31 degrees) for minimal stress for 1 second. This causes the heatsink fan to constantly cycle up and down. It is "working", but in my opinion it is not working properly. The temperature sensor is spiking and sending a signal to the motherboard to increase fan speed. Unless I set my fan speed to 80% constant or above I have a cpu fan constantly cylcing up and down.

So, my example would be as follows:

Web browser is open to a web page with an embedded video. Temperature is idling at 30 Celsius.

Click to play 3 minute embedded video. On the click - temperature spikes to 60 Celsius for ONE second and my cpu fan increases speed.

Temperature immediately (before fans have spun up entirely) returns to 32 Celsius for the remainder of the 3 minute video

This means the temperature for all but ONE second of the video was 32 Celsius. About 5 seconds after increasing speed, my fans return to normal idle speed.

That to me is not normal behavior. I have had numerous Intel processors over the years and I've never had this behavior. While different cores might have had temperature differences, the temperatures weren't bouncing all over the place. There was a normal rate of temperature increase.

I feel that you will undoubtedly say that this is within spec and proper behavior, so I'm done trying to figure it out. Between trying to troubleshoot this and 'bleeping' Windows 10, I'm tempted to get rid of everything. Maybe the reason Windows 10 is giving me trouble is this processor.