OK so it's done for the moment. Lots of issues, will run through those.
I got home last night and fitted the new CPU block. Went well. I then drilled the reinforcement plate I made the other week and bolted that in. Which allows me to fit all three nuts and bolts to the vertical riser. The Phanteks riser never fitted very well, as I had basically modded the entire case to take the Cooler Master one, yet the ribbons on those are crap and it failed.
Now I could fit and remove the GPU waaaay easier. It's night and day, with literally no sag at all. Before it had one bolt in the bottom, so it sagged even with a 2070 in there (a literal featherweight).
I then ran into issue number one. The res is huge. How they work it out IDK, but mine was a 100mm and this was supposed to be a 150 yet it is twice as long. This is good, because it means I can have more coolant in there, but the whole loop was not going to work as it was. There was just no room.
I removed a stop plug on the flow meter to move it to the bottom hole (so I could come out at an angle) and it cross threaded. The only way to remove it was to take the flow meter apart. All told it took me about two hours to fix this, and it was leaking afterward. I've also fitted the ceramic pole the wrong way around and thus it won't spin now (but flow is still very good).
Issue two then raised its head. The RGB adapter for Gigabyte's unique 3 pin fan but RGB connector was wired with the black wire as 5v. I have never seen something so idiotic. So of course I fitted it with the blue wire to 5v. Problem is once you put the GPU in you can not get to it without removing the GPU which isn't fun when you have two litres of coolant in your PC. Any way I found a way around it (thanks to the new design of the vertical riser) and got that working.
Issue 3. I thought I had two 8 pin extensions in the rig (black). Turns out I had a 8 pin and 6 pin. That's OK though, thankfully I had a spare 8 pin in grey which looks fantastic in there.
Issue 4. Windows killdate. Windows updated itself. The rig rebooted. I installed the GPU driver, tried to run 3dmark (anything just to test the card) and I installed Precision X1. I went into Precision but I had no clock control, no voltage, no power or thermal limit nothing. It was all greyed out. Then 3dmark would not get past the hardware scan. So I disabled the hardware scan and ran Time Spy, card was not boosting and was sitting at 1350mhz which made it slower than a 2080.
By now it was midnight. I had spent two hours just trying to get something running so I could test the GPU. I conceded that in the end I would need to reinstall Windows.
By this time Windows had died any way, and I was getting "unable to find boot device". This was after the killdate.
Great, only one issue. I took every single USB stick I own over to my mother's for building the NAS. I found a SD card, but I have thrown away all of the readers. In desperation I dug through my crawl space and found my PSone mini and thank the heavens there was a 32gb stick poking out of the front. Took the rig down, moved it, put my other rig in and made a boot stick.
By 2am I had Windows back on, this time in UEFI. How it ended up in Legacy I have absolutely no idea. This time, however, it worked. Seems I did well on the GPU front too.
There is one thing left I want to do. Aquasuite still will not pick up my Farbwerk or LT on their own USB splitters. So I am going to have to connect them directly to the mobo.
Then I can get rid of that god awful bloody pink it has defaulted to and have full control over all of the RGB again. Something lacking since I removed my Intel mobo and AquaComputer blame on Ryzen /rolls eyes.