ShadySocks

I have a zenbook flip 15, any pen which supports Microsoft Pen Protocol (MPP) works for me

I’m recommending a thinkpad or dell latitude because those tend to have the best support for thunderbolt as they are a very common use case for those laptops and will have good support.

I would get the 4060 because the 3060 is almost 3 years old at this point, so ideally it would have more life left in it especially software wise and higher resale value.

I have a beelink ser5, you can get em for really cheap https://slickdeals.net/f/17215210-beelink-ser5-mini-pc-80-100-off-10-coupon-10-exclusive-prime-coupon-e-g-ryzen-5-5560u-16-500g-183?src=jfy&prop=rcmid-0998fd6f730f286e5544da6e2a457d51&attrsrc=JFYCarousel%3APosition%3A10|JFYCarousel%3AType%3Athread It performs well, not too loud but not silent either. I think it's a good option but the price is high. Maybe you can consider something with a laptop class gpu like from minisforum or the new asus nuc.

Yeah my suspicion is that the cable got dislodged a little bit when moving and burned like the 12VHPWR ones. The latch was still in place though, I hope seasonic honors my warranty.

I noticed when I first upgraded from an old gaming laptop to a decently powerful PC that I would get framerate drops when I also had network spikes. Doing all the random optimizations like closing every possible process and micro tweaking driver didn't really affect framerate. For the first time my computer was faster than the servers lol, I guess you don't really notice a drop in fps when I was used to running at 30fps. That and maybe check the windows event log for anything which could be causing issues.

Single cable I thought it would be unnessessary to use two cables because they share a rail (also it's a SFF build) but apparently not... Is it common for these to melt when using just one cable?

Yes, this also happens to me especially when playing VALORANT. You can try playing in windowed fullscreen mode but I think that increases latency/decreases fps. A long time ago I was also getting this problem when playing csgo but I think it was because the gpu was delaminating from the motherboard...

Is the GPU also clearly producing 140w of heat? Also you can enable a toolbar in nvidia control panel which shows which applications are using GPU, please find out if there are any.

Yeah I created an RMA with Seasonic 10 year warranty B) here is image

update: i found one of the pins in my PSU melted...

Windows saves audio levels between devices so maybe it was switching between your speakers which were at a normal volume and your monitor speakers which were muted. Windows also auto switches between devices when it detects something is disconnected so I think that is the cause. Can you verify that the random muting does/doesn't switch audio device?

I just finished moving my PC to a new apartment and booted up VALORANT. However, the PC kept restarting after a few minutes of playing. I capped my fps to 200 and that fixed it. I have a Seasonic SGX 650 power supply which I used to run a 3090 off of (without problem) but I downgraded to a 3070 Ti. My cpu is a 5600x so it sips power. I used to have random reboots but they were very few and far between. I checked my temps and they were fine.

As a troubleshooting step maybe you can try unplugging all audio devices and see if windows keeps randomly muting, it may be a bad connection to your speakers. Also is it your audio output muting or your microphone?

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/gigabyte-aero-16-4k-amoled-gaming-laptop-intel-i7-12700h-16gb-memory-nvidia-geforce-rtx-3070-ti-1tb-ssd/6499104.p?skuId=6499104 This seems too good to be true? I impulse bought this laptop, good thing Best Buy has an amazing return policy