sergster1

For what its worth overclocking your laptop GPU may increase performance but if you're thinking you're going to get a 30% increase in performance you're surely mistaken. Even if you overclock your mobile GPU they're still hindered by two basic but very crucial components. Power delivery and cooling, if you've ever compared the power delivery circuit on a desktop GPU to a mobile one you'll see that its magnitudes better than mobile ones and the heatsinks that laptops use to cool GPUs can't even come close to those that are used on desktops. 

I'm pretty sure the USB-C front panel connector is forward and backwards compatible. Its a slimmer connection than the USB 3.0 connector.

Hey I'm Sergio, I'm more of a desktop guy (9900K, Aorus Master, 32 GB Corsair Vengeance Pros, 1080Ti Hybrid FTW3) but I recently got a decent but older clevo p177sm that I'm looking to breathe new life into. 

A picture of your thermal paste application would be useful because that seems very weird.