Long story short, my Asus motherboard had a damaged trace to the DIMM slots I and haven't gotten anywhere with ASUS support. This CPU is still perfectly fine. My buddy had an extra AMD 9950x3d for a good price so it made more sense to switch than to replace my very expensive Intel board (ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Formula). My brother's rig runs this is exact CPU so I am able to test it, and it is obviously working as expected. I have kept up on BIOS updates, and you can see from the images there is clearly no damage from microcode issues. Make sure you do the same if you get this CPU.