I'm putting the old mobo and proc and bare minimum of parts into another case and will know in about 5 if that does any good.
And yes, quite the puzzler... the one that really makes no sense is that it was running fine with the new mobo. Had restarted and shutdown and played around and all was good. Then after the last shutdown and start attempt it was toast. Not like I did anything to it while it was shutdown overnight. Gremlins I suppose... I'll post back in a few.