You could try llamaCPP, I think its configured to run better on cpu’s

How many HDD are you running? Set to spin down or no? Those spinning all the time add up quickly.

Sleep state and power States are different things… I’ve never heard of power profiles causing issues. I’d try keeping sleep disabled in BIOS and then look into what you need to change to allow the processor to idle/downclock. There’s no reason this shouldn’t work I’m aware of.

Could try undervolting as well.

Clearly just upset you got conned into paying hundreds for an inferior product

I’ve used both extensively and stand by my statement, from a functional standpoint as well.

For the downloading media part:

The *arr stack is what you’re looking for + Jellyfin for streaming (Opensource, 100% free, and much better than Plex).

Prowlarr: manage your indexers

Radarr: find/automatically download movies

Sonarr: find/automatically download tv shows

Jellyfin: streaming your media

Look up trashguides for setting up all this stuff, very detailed guides. They are compatible with torrents and Usenet. I like using docker with portainer for easy management and if you use a VPN container you can selectively route these containers through the VPN so your other services that dont require the VPN dont need to route through it.