Gonna be honest I was wondering why you guys were saying Welsh spent so much money on casual game.
"The biggest percentage of your money comes from whales," not Wales. I am clearly not the sharpest bulb in the bunch.
Just change the bclk in the bios. Any z97 board should have the option to do so. If you look at my userbench scores you can see my hardware in full detail. I'll put together a file to show what my settings are too I guess.
Then is the file even there. If you are sure it is and just can't see even with hidden files viewable you can use the command line or system user to find it. Also try manually typing the directory into the address bar of your file manager
You should never pop it. If it gets infected you should de-lid it with a clean/sterilised instrument. The 80% isopropyl bit could actually be good advice (it is actually used for sterilisation) if it is infected although it would be a lot less painful if 70% were used.
Can you post a picture of the processes in task manager (found in the details tab). To me it sounds like a cpu usage issue (with the lower settings making it worse)