Crunchy Dragon

If your GPU was on the way out, it's more likely that your entire system would shut down, possibly throw a BSOD, a POST code, or fail to boot.

Yeah, just uninstall your drivers with DDU and reinstall the newest or next newest ones from the manufacturer site.

Generally speaking, Windows 11 won't install unless TPM2.0 is present, and that's something that's packaged in the CPU these days. If the CPUs have that, Windows 11 should install with no problems. Is there a reason you can't or don't want to install Windows 10?

Run DDU to clean out your drivers, then install the most recent or next most recent version directly from Nvidia/AMD's website(whichever one you have), and see if it happens again. Usually driver crashes aren't anything to worry about, just means your drivers are unstable or behaving weirdly with something. Do you have any GPU overclocks in place?

Did the rest of the PC keep running? Fans, lights, peripherals, everything but the display signal? Sounds like you might have had a driver crash.

After seeing both movies and reading the book, I have to agree, it was a little disappointing. Part 1 is definitely more true to the book than Part 2. Although I do think they both stand on their own in terms of cinematic quality; they are very well-made films, and I can appreciate them for that. However, they do fall behind in terms of adapting the book, and the quality dips in comparison to the book.

Resetting the CMOS should do that.

I'm quite scared to see how much power my home server draws on average.... Probably gonna downsize to a NUC or something in a couple years.

Honestly, I've never ran XMP in any of my systems until very recently when I switched to X299. I don't think it matters quite as much as people make it out to, especially on platforms that aren't Zen or Zen+.

It'll run. XMP settings might be finicky, but it shouldn't be the end of the world. DDR5 is so blazingly fast naturally, I doubt any of us would really notice a performance difference with the slowest DDR5 compared to the midrange DDR4.

I'm not currently aware of anything that would let you do that. It may be faster to install if the installer is directly on the drive you're installing on, but it's near infinitely more convenient to have a USB drive with your installer on it. I keep a USB drive with Ventoy installed that holds all my various operating system installers, that I can grab and install just about anything short of macOS from just one drive.

The pin in the very bottom right corner stands out, it looks ever so slightly flatter than the rest. Doesn't look like it should be a problem though, based on what I can make out. I would say it's up to OP if you want to try fixing it or not, or just return the board under warranty.

Definitely do it for fun when you have a replacement laptop. It's just not quite worth that kind of time and investment when it's your primary device, if that makes sense.

It was an ASUS psyop all along

The only thing I would consider worth doing to it while this is your main laptop is replacing the battery. After you have another, better laptop, then you can mess around with this one to your heart's content.

If you can hunt down an Intel NUC or another similar mini PC, that'd be a pretty good place to start. Small, quiet, enough horsepower that you can throw Proxmox on there and run some virtual machines without drawing too much power. For a NAS, you could look at some external drives either plain old USB or in a Thunderbolt or RAID enclosure. HP and Lenovo make some compact PCs as well that you could check out, HardwareHaven on YouTube has some videos covering those, the HP EliteDesk and Lenovo ThinkCentre. Honestly, even a laptop running Linux or something similar would be a viable option if you can find one with enough CPU, RAM, and storage.

Are you tightening it down properly? It's similar to putting a wheel on a car; you have to tighten all the screws by hand until they don't turn anymore, then pick one and torque it down, then do the one in the corner opposite that one, in an X pattern. Tightening the cooler down to spec shouldn't cause your PC to stop booting, is there anything bent or out of place, either in your CPU socket or otherwise?

Seems like a silly obvious question, but is your CPU fan plugged in? Many modern motherboards refuse to boot if the CPU_FAN header isn't populated. What exactly do you mean by this: Are you putting the heatsink on the CPU but not tightening it down? Are you tightening it down just enough to not hit the line before it stops booting?

Personally my favorite is Thermalwrong. /s

Yup. It basically doesn't matter, but to some extent, you will get what you pay for.

I'd definitely try the classifieds, or other circles(online or IRL) you're in where people might be interested.

Does your PC shut down when your monitor turns black, or does it keep running? Do you still get audio output after the screen turns black? Have you tried running DDU and installing a slightly older GPU driver? What you're describing sounds like either a driver crash or a software problem, in this case specific to your Adobe programs. The legitimacy of your Adobe software may or may not be to blame here. Are you able to try a different software version?

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Shoot, can't argue with that. Congratulations, my friend!