It isn't.
Is it possible that my motherboard is just poorly handling my components?
This isn't the first Asrock 970 Pro3 R2.0 that I've used, and my experience with the model is that it's quirky.
My last motherboard of that kind lasted over a year, causing strange issues (the strangest being that playing on a certain Gmod server could cause a crash then POST failure) to develop and accumulate with increasing rapidity until the thing finally died for good.
This one has developed at least two noticable problems already:
1) It has to be manually restarted after changing BIOS settings, it just sits there with a black screen generating lots of heat until I hit the restart button.
2) It is terrible at heat management, a 10% CPU load which should be able to use the lowest clock speed and multiplier instead uses very high clock speeds and multipliers which in turn makes it get much hotter than the last motherboard.
3?) The motherboard gets unusually hot, about as hot as the last motherboard did before death; however this might be an extension of the last problem. I do know however that the motherboard temperature registers at about 5°C higher than the temperature of the air inside the case assuming a meat thermometer is reliable for measuring air temperature if you leave it in the case for long enough.
So I suspect my motherboard has problems I don't know about causing my whole setup to perform badly.