I just put one together. The covers are in holes for the antenna sockets. there's plenty of room. I did have to enlarge the holes for the sockets I got. I ordered all of it as a package from friendly Electric. They have a nice page for ordering. I got the wifi/Bluetooth card the Emmc and the nano pi with screen. I had to install the wifi card, antennas, the Emmc and my nvme drive. The case is very well done. One of the best I've seen. Better than the aluminum vim3 case. I think better than the orange pi M5 plus case. This case is tight! Everything fit perfectly.

The issue happened again, and each time it occurred so far, it was after some heavy write activity over several hours which resulted in the cooler becoming noticeably warm (but could still be touched without burning the hand). Could heat be related to this? Its strange that it would only affect the bootloader though. Any ideas what heavy load could have to to with this otherwise?

Ah gotcha.

We do have 3A https://fi.mirror.armbian.de/incoming/igorpecovnik/rock-3a/archive/ (need report if this latest build works) and build config for 3C but not 3B. Does it make sense to make for 3C too or 3A can cover them all. I don't have any of those, so I can't check.

He probably meant upstream driver version v5.7.9_35795.20191128 https://github.com/jwrdegoede/rtl8189ES_linux/blob/rtl8189fs/include/rtw_version.h and by looking into Makefile it feels as we are in 2010