Sabrent NVMe heatsink came in! Installing it was kind of a mess. ASUS has a ‘Q’ screw that ‘helps’ install NVMe drives. However, the sabrent heatsink has a bottom section that helps wick heat from the bottom of the NVMe drive:
Normally , on their own these would be helpful things. Together, they do not work so well. In order to get the Q screw to actually hold down the NVMe, drive, I had to omit the bottom part of the heatsink for now: still doing some research on if it’s possible to remove the Q screw and substitute it for a regular nvme M screw.
So, right now the NVMe drive is installed with the Q screw, and the top of the heatsink is being held on by the thermal pads, and its weight. Not the best, but it’s functional. (It does operate 10C hotter than the top NVMe)…
Back to software, I was able to install truenas scale’s cobia update! It went very smoothly!
Something that didn’t go very smoothly was setting up a debian 12 VM with iGPU passthrough - I think this could be the issue people were talking about on the unraid forums with the onboard IPMI, I’ll let you all know if I find a solution for it.
What would happen is when setting up the VM with iGPU passthrough, during the last step, the GUI would throw a ‘too many concurrent calls.’ error and the VM would be created, but trying to start the VM would cause the infinite spinning circle of death 
! As a fun side bonus, the VM would attempt to start when booting the server, so the only solution was to reinstall truenas core fresh; thankfully, the configuration import/export button exists and was a lifesaver here!
So, for now, instead of doing GPU passthrough, I followed @wendell 's guide with video hand holding and do have some good news to report! No creating a bridge, no black magic, was required atleast on truenas scale cobia, this w680 motherboard, and a debian12 VM in order to allow the VM to ping the host!
I even managed to get a palworld server installed 
Still, there are a few things I need to figure out:
- Can the ASUS W680M PRO ACE SE’s Q screw be replaced?
- The W680M PRO ACE SE has 2x2.5GbE, but the TrueNAS Boot shows only 2x1000MiB. Where is this set?
- How can I safely allow my friends to connect to the palworld server?
- iGPU passthrough issues
See y’all next post.