Found a seller selling uber reflective tape online, bought a 15mm wide roll of it, cut a piece off and stick it to the display side.
Now I can finally see what's going on without having to poke my head forward. Yay!
Bought a used 2023 model for the 4060, the 16GB * 2 setup, and that massive heatsink.
Fist was to swap out the 512GB SSD and replace that with a 1TB Samsung 970EVO plus I bought for under 80CAD on prime day like 2 to 3 years ago (ah, the good old days).
And the laptop refused up power on.
After a frantic flurry of many many many tests... The stressed out me managed not to blame the seller, and found a couple things.
The laptop appears to cut power to everything if it detect the back panel was removed (I found something what might be a light sensor). This requires the laptop to be plugged back onto a charger or a Type C PD power adapter.
Well, the supplied power adapter(Asus ROG 240W slim model, in mint cosmetic condition) was flaky and could not reliably send out power, and thus was unable to unlock the powercut.
I did not know about this, and did not expect complete power cut without the ThinkPad like BIOS option to trigger it. But i was just trying things out, the red charging light turned on when a 65W PD charger was connected(battery disconnected). That wasn't able to power on, well tried again and it powered on like nothing had happened.
Whew!
Now i have installed CachyOS and moved most of the settings and data from my 2020 G14. Now, I just need to wait for me thermal putty to arrive(held for custom inspection, I hope they don't try to eat it) to being the glorious task of repasting both with PTM7950 and thermal putty all the other parts.
The 2023 G14 is showing symptoms of uneven LM coverage and heats up to 90+C at 25% load in cyberpunk built-in benchmark tests. Ah well, should be fun dealing with LM, never had the chance of messing with it before.