Ryuio

thats Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G, I'm pretty sure there is a gaming laptop out there with a Ryzen 7 1700x.

Thats just a website and most of the people forget about the tweaking and stuff, a 1700x with low latency ram and some tweaks can beat the i7-7700K ^^'

I doubt that would work with a stock cooler, you could get a Noctua cooler ^^

Hmm look at your temps maybe thermalthrottling, I wouldn't say there is a bottleneck or something?

The i7-8700K is way to expensive also there are only Z370 mainboards for it out there and they are really expensive, you could go with an Ryzen and save some bucks get almost the same performance. Ryzen and some Low Latency ram are pretty nice.

Maybe the bootloader is broken?

Thats overkill, and ye as @Nerdtality said better look for server Hardware.

You could try undervolting it? otherwise check if you applied the paste correctly

I mean at that point, old server hardware from ebay could be a better deal?

Try to put in into another PCI-e slot, it could be your mainboard ^^' Also try to use only your 8GB Ram stick maybe thats the issue

The best way to check wether its fake or real, is to take the graphics card apart and look at the GPU like @Radium_Angel said. It seems like a real one... its normal that this EVGA card has 1 6-pin and 1 8-pin

There are only 4 screws u have to remove? The 4 big ones. Also could u take a picture of your 970 and post it?

A 970 with only 2GB? that isn't possible tho.. 970s come with 4GB usually Also if you could you remove the cooler from the 970 and look at the GPU number? Should be something with GM204-200-A1

10GB of DDR3? One 4GB and three 2GB? Is that possible to have 10GB Ram?

The rest of your system specs? Maybe a bottleneck (Probably not) or any of the other components are damaged could be that?