No, microcode updates are done through the bios of the motherboard. It is not a hardware change to the CPU. Hardware changes would be typically marked by a "Stepping" change. They used to etch the stepping on the IHS, but I don't believe that practice is done anymore.
Yeah... just motherboard shenanigans with computer case pinouts. Not much more I can do if OP can't figure this out. Maybe take a pic of the actual mobo near that JFP1 pins and I can circle the thing to pull out. lol
If the mobo is indeed a MSI Z97 Gaming 5, then it's the pin shown in the following diagrams taken from your mobo manual. Pull out the cable that's connected to the highlighted pin and the power LED won't turn on for the computer case.
It should, but you can always run Microsoft's PC Health Check tool for Win 11 compatibility. You might have to enable TPM in bios though if you haven't already.
The ribbon collapses like that when your monitor resolution is really narrow or if the window is really narrow. Don't think there's a setting to force it not to group them.
Intel benchmarks quite well. It's just the underlying extra L3 cache on the X3D chips that you'll see the X3D smoke the 14th gen in calculation heavy games... and the 14th gen i9's tend to burn itself to the ground trying to stay boosted in long durations. lol
For the lulz, threw in a RAMdisk for this DDR5-6800 CL34 kit.
EDIT: For even more memes, OC'd the ram to 7400 CL34. Almost broke 20k on the sequential writes. lol
How old is your AIO?
Can you also take a picture of the waterblock/pump and a picture where it shows the pwm cable from the pump to which 4-pin pwm header you're got connected to the motherboard?
I do a lot of sim gaming of all sorts so the X3D would really benefit from my use case. Thought about a 9950X3D, but could not justify that extra step up for practically no benefit for me since I'm not really doing very heavy CAD work at home.
Can't really tell from the picture on the orientation of your rig. Is your build inverted? Trying to figure out how you've configured your AIO layout.
I'm trying to figure out if your pump's above or below the radiator.
I would just RMA the chip at this point. Under no circumstances should you need to tweak stuff in the BIOS to make it run stable on default settings out of the box.
Let AMD deal with the problem.