You have been very helpful, and I really do appreciate your time.
Do you know what programs use AVX instructions? If none of the programs I regularly run use AVX instructions, I should be OK, right?
I will run your suggested Prime95 tests tomorrow and post the results here. As for your suggestion of decreasing vCore voltage, I followed the same suggestions from other forums and did that for now to make it more stable and "safer" for the CPU. However, I honestly don't think that should be the answer Intel gives to solve the issue; "Just decrease your voltages and you'll be fine". They really have to be embarrassed at how this has turned out, and if they're not, they should be. I've been able to overclock the Pentium G3258 to 4.5GHz and the i5 4690k to 4.7GHz with no issues. Yet here we are talking about struggles with out-of-the-box temperatures on one of Intel's higher-end unlocked processor here - the flagship of their 4th generation consumer processor family. Intel has said this processor can be overclocked to 5.0GHz, but I haven't even had the courage to try overclocking this yet due to these temperatures on stock settings. If we can't even overclock this processor at safe temperatures, what's the point of purchasing a K CPU? I may as well have paid less and purchased a regular 4790.
Judging by the sheer number of people that are having this same issue with the same processor, I don't think they can turn a blind eye to this. Eventually, they will have to address it. I just really hope they don't do what they recently did with the Pentium processor issue, which is pay back a measly $15 and tell us to be happy with that...
I'm still waiting on response from Intel customer service. Will update when I get a response.