Ghost Potato

aye, it's kind of that way everywhere right now. Kinda what I was worried about

I would check to make sure that you're not thermal throttling, a 6700k is a little old nowadays but it's still a very high performance CPU and you shouldn't be bottlenecked too badly with a 3070.

If you bump down the quality of the stream significantly you might be okay If you're streaming in SD you should be okay with burnout, honestly if you plan to stream I would see if you can snag a GTX 1660 or 1660 Ti you'll get a better gaming experience overall and NVENC will really help you out on those streams. ( If you can find one at a decent price)

Make sure that no metal is making contact with the motherboard as well, this can sometimes happen if two traces are being bridged that shouldn't. To me, though it looks like a dead GPU.

aw sweet!

I've had a similar issue before, I would let it go for a little while longer maybe 20 minutes? sometimes it just takes a bit. the blinking should mean it's still working, when you see a solid light or no light that should mean it's done. If it still is going after 20 minutes or so then someone more knowledgeable than me will prolly have to take a crack at it.

Does your board have any lights or indicators on it?

Generally, background processes will affect boost clock as well. that's why you'll see turbo speeds in windows.

I have had this really strange error on my desktop background ever since I upgraded to an RTX card, no idea if it's some sort of weird driver comparability thing or if it's something else, I've uploaded a small snippet of what happens below, I've DDUed several times and my drivers are up to date, I can't find anything about this bug anywhere online It doesn't impact performance any but it bothers me beyond reason. I haven't had this happen with any GPU I've used in the past.