Now that my hatred for this computer is gone, I can tell my full story
I found out that I had about $6,000 more than I thought I did. I broke my lease in Cincinnati early and was responsible for six more months of rent. It turns out that they leased it almost immediately, so I got my last month of rent back, plus my deposit, plus I don't have to pay them anymore. Filled with joy, I drove over to Microcenter and picked up a TR 1950X, an Asus Zenith Extreme X399 board, 32GB of memory, an AIO cooler, a Corsair AIR540 case (which I love, by the way), and an M.2 drive. I got home, went to sleep, and started putting the computer together the next day. That is when sadness struck...
First, my CPU had a damaged orange bracket. Half of the little clips on it were broken, and it was slightly cracked at one end. I gently put it into the mounting slot and closed it. Then Foxconn struck. A ton of people have had issues with the socket retention bracket not closing well enough to be able to screw in the star screw labelled 1. I tried wiggling it, shifting it, nothing. In attempts to figure out the problem, I removed the CPU cassette several times. One time, as I was holding it, the CPU fell out of the orange bracket right onto the socket. It seemed to be in there correct and I had no easy way to remove it since there was no orange bracket.
Hoping against hope, I went forward assuming that the orange bracket wasn't necessary for clearance or stability purposes. Putting as much of my weight as I could (seriously, I was scared) onto the pointy screwdriver provided by AMD, I finally got the star screws to bite.
I set about building the system only to find that my video card didn't work. I wasn't sure what the problem was exactly because the helpful LED display on the Asus motherboard has some sort of problem and I can only read part of it. Swapping out video cards, I finally got a POST. Holy crap. I flashed the BIOS and set about installing Linux Mint (Ubuntu was taking hours to download).
Of course, being a new motherboard, the wifi drivers weren't easy to come by. After some digging, I found the solution I posted above - essentially one of the adapters isn't supported yet and the other has corrupted firmware in the main repositories. Finally, way too long after I started, I have a computer.
At the time, if I had super powers, I'd have flung AMD, Asus, and Foxconn into the sun. Now, I'm not sure how I feel. It definitely feels like Asus didn't do proper QC since so many people are having this bracket problem and I'm having the LED display problem. For $570, I want more quality and fewer stupid stickers. Anyway, I've got POV-Ray installed and I'll be taking the system out for some tests this weekend. If anyone has any questions, feel free to hit me up. I don't regret the build, but I'm just disappointed in the quality issues I've encountered along the way. Maybe I'm too needy.