It's not about melting the GPU, but what clocks you get on it. If it works on base clocks when fully loaded for prolonged time, then it's okay, if it drops below base clocks, then it is bad.
As for 8700 (non-K) it should be fine in Sentry 2.0
As for 1080TI in horizontal position - I'd recommend going for blower if you want to use it horizontally - it will pull fresh air from the side as well this way.
It takes more space to do this, either below the motherboard for the riser to not intrude motherboard clearance so you loose the CPU cooling height, or you waste lot of space to angle the riser around the GPU. Also really expensive riser required which is heated either by the back of GPU or CPU.
Reasonable response is that we don't want to state any dates at this point. We have to order another prototype with fixes based on what we've got with this first one, but there are few things we have to figure out before we can do that. After that goes the package design and tooling for its production, prototype/review batch and preparations for gathering orders/campaign.
Note that we are not a pc hardware manufacturing company in our main scope of business and there are other bigger projects that are occupying our time.
