Thanks. I used this guide and got the plat in 16 hours. I did hard core first (for the challenge) and then assisted for the collectibles run. This made it so I only had to farm for about 1.5 hours before mopping up nightmare and inferno, since I already had a lot of points saved....
So the months troubleshooting nightmare began - reinstall windows / wipe gpu driver / reinstall gpu driver / flash bios / wipe all asus related software / reinstall windows / reseat ram / turn off monitor settings - but one test stopped the game crashing issue - tried a different...