8-Bit Ninja

What you want is something like Google Stadia

If you can’t feel the “crater” then I doubt it’s the problem, dyes are surprisingly resilient. To be honest with you OP you’re probably in over your head here. With a volt meter, a full circuit diagram and a reasonable understand of electronics you could possibly track down the issue. But unless you can find something obvious the chances of you locating the damage with your eyes alone and slim to none.

Identical process to fix cracked solder, only difference is instead of lifting the component off the pads you keep it in place on the pads

Not necessarily, I used to work for an electronics company and we would usually remove SMC components with a glorified heat gun.

There's no risk of damaging the board through ESD with a heat gun, you can put too much heat into the board and cause the layers to delaminate however.

Difficult to say really, could possibly be a cracked solder joint (In which case reheating the card and "reballing" could fix). The board could also have split inside and due to it being a multi layer PCB with internal traces would look fine on the outside (if that's the case its pretty much unfixable unless you can track down where the trace is damaged, locate where it goes from and to and then solder a wire between the two as a replacement line).

Another option, at least in the UK is buying a cd key through Amazon, probably still stolen. But I've gotten windows 10 keys for £4 before and if for whatever reason they don't work, its Amazon so getting your money back is a breeze.

Most people could probably get a crappy old card off a friend for dirt cheap as well, I have a oem gtx 660 and a radeon hd 7870 that i'd just give away if someone need a card to tide them over

Just take the switches apart one by one?

Water cooling will yield better temperatures and typically quieter operation, however it simply comes down to cost. If your computer has cost you $1,500 then spending another $500+ on custom water cooling for a slight performance bump and reduction in noise is a waste of funds that could be put to better use just buying higher end parts.

Interesting, that would imply the system is actually booting. I know your CPU doesn't have onboard graphics, do you have a spare or know someone who could lend you their GPU to quickly swap in and confirm its not a dead GPU.

Most people surprisingly don’t, but they make life so much easier.

When you switch it on what happens? Do you the fans spin and continue spinning until you cut the power? I believe your board also has DEBUG LED's, can you say which ones stay lit when you attempt to boot the system?

In your case its going to be slightly more complex. Install a BIOS that supports both your 1600 and 3600x with your 1600 installed. Then remove the 1600 and install the 3600x, once you confirmed it'll boot id then suggest installing the latest full release BIOS to improve system stability.

TF2? That and CS are the only two I know of that are going to run somewhat well on integrated graphics. You can always just disable chat in CS if that's an issue.