After reading this thread I realise how lucky I am to be living in Australia and not the US. We have decent consumer protection laws over here with free channels to persue instead of having to dish out money for a lawyer.
That is actually the Tcase temperature listed there, which is the maximum temp at the heat spreader level.
The Tmax listed on my x5650 in coretemp is 96 degrees celcius.
Also the throttling that you are seeing is due to your P6T motherboard, not the CPU, as mentioned previously in this...
After swapping my i7-920 for an x5650 earlier this week on my P6T and running into a similar problem when trying for 22x multiplier, I found out that this is a common issue on the P6T boards, try googling P6T throttling. Effectively the max multi you can use is 20x, when I set 22x myself my CPU...
I wouldn't completely discount the CPU. The three memory controllers are on the CPU, and if it locks up after a few minutes then it could be a heat related issue with one of the three. I've certainly seen stranger things in my life...
the VID is the specified voltage range.
Intel doesn't specify the VID range for it's i7-8xx processors, but for the i7-9xx processors it it specifies the acceptable VID to be between 0.800 - 1.375 V link to intel specs
SpeedStep/C1E explains the speed-up/down once booted, but definately not the bus speed,which is 197 Mhz.
Most likely some sort of motherboard auto-overclocking tool in the BIOS that is enabled.