i went into the BIOS and disabled some dummy settings that i think crunchers should generally know, but aren't talked about in enough places. So here goes:

turn off c1e
turn off c6 state
turn off turbo
turn off cool n quiet
turn off apm

and there was another timing thing that i turned off, i'll figure it out after a restart and post here.

anyway, i've got everything back to full blast 100% with kernel 21 and have had NO errors since.