okay - came home a bit early, and first i un-installed the rest of the asus utilities (EZ Update, USB 3.0 Boost, and System information) - had zero effect on temps
i then reset CMOS as well as RTC, went into BIOS and selected default settings, and dis-abled XMP and turbo boost - rebooted and ran XTU
idle temps were same 42-44C at avg 2% usage, and running the XTU stress test, saw 72-74C, 100% usage and .....drum roll.....3.80GHz cpu freq where i'd been at 2.80 max with current limit set to 56A to keep temps down,
went back into bios and enabled XMP - also looked for cpu power controls as i noticed turbo power boost was at 4094W and same for Short duration power boost, but for whatever reason, everything is on "auto" with no other selection possible that might load the settings screen or options.
rebooted, ran XTU and with XMP enabled, idle temps were at 48-51C, but under stress test they "only" went up to 74-75C for most of the stress test with some spikes to 79-81C. Much much better than i had seen to date, and the cpu frequency is now at 4.0GHz, which is the spec'd boost freq for my 4790 (locked) cpu. I went into XTU manual controls to adjust the watt limits and current limit, (84W, 105W & 257A) but saw no change in XTU stress test
I then ran the benchmarking in XTU and got the highest score yet, 976, which was 2 positions down from the highest scores in the comparison graph online for my cpu.
considering my cpu resides in a SFF case and i'm still using the stock intel cooler, i'm happy - i believe with an improved cooler, those temps will come down some.
did a short video file for 5 minutes, and highest temp i saw was a single spike to 78, with 99% of the video transcoding at 72-74.
I don't know whether the asus utilities were "glitching" the intel PDT program before, but i ran it 5 times this afternoon, and it passed all five.times. FIngers crossed, i'll try this again later tonite and probably do it again for a few days - i'll definitely keep Real Temp running as a temp monitor
thanks to ken_intel, sampark1980 and everyone that contributed to this thread - for anyone else reviewing this thread, the changes that i noticed brought improvement in temps were the following:
1) un-installing ASUS performance utility - dropped temp at idle by approx 6C and at 100% usage 3-5C - don't know if it was interfering with the bios as it has some ability to change bios settings
2) clearing CMOS & RTC and resetting to default settings.- brought the biggest improvement, brought my temps down to mid 70C while allowing cpu freq to climb to 4.0GHz with no limiting (temp, power or current) and allowing me to run XMP - XMP did make my temps jump up about 6C at idle, and 3-5C in 100% usage
again, thanks to all