I went through the comments briefly and didn’t see anything about cases. I highly recommend spending some money on a good case with good cable management slots. It may not look important but it will make life so much easier. Fractal cases are good budget friendly ones. I usually prefer large bulky cases (I like ATX), to ensure good ventilation and easiness to assemble things. Having plenty of space to move around helps a lot while cleaning also.

Another thing, you will see a lot of articles about positive pressure or negative pressure fan arrangement and all. TBH, I really don’t think that matters a lot. Just regular cleaning with a cheap rocket air blower will do. And more than 4 fans are not really needed. The gain is negligible. But ensure you have a good dedicated fan/water cooling for CPU cooling. I recommend Noctua for air cooling.

Oh regarding backing up your data, make sure you plug in your SSD once in a while, to avoid charge depletion. Nowadays the claim is SSDs have better retention and you don’t need to keep it active, but I’m not really sure.

Can you share the current settings you used? For me a good starting point is a preset with target resolution, and then fine tuning RF value to get a good reduction in size.

That comment is just speculation… In fact many of the Adguard employees are from Ukraine and other not so pro Russian countries. I remember their support being almost stale when the war started.