Sooo....Some people might've noticed from some other threads that as part of this build, I made a few (rookie) mistakes. First I didn't clean the edge of one of the tubes properly, which resulted in me accidentally shaving a small piece off of an o-ring that ended up in my GPU block. The second mistake was just thinking distilled water was fine (it wasn't).
So - plan was to take off GPU block, remove sliver, and then re-fill with mystic fog (basically something with a biocide to kill the algea that was building up on the blocks).
For the GPU block, EK confirmed that I could remove the top cover by only accessing screws from the front of the block - this was preferred as I made a custom mount that actually makes it a real pain to take off the GPU (will explain later). So with this knowledge was quite happy and tried to take off the front of the GPU block to remove that pesky sliver. Aaaand turns out EK wasn't quite right - there was one small screw that needed to be removed from the back, so I proceeded to field strip my system, take off the front panel of the GPU block, pull out sliver, and put it all back together.
Somewhere in the process I borked my 2080ti...#*@&$^@#*$...This was a rather costly mistake, although I guess to date I have been lucky as this is the first failure I have ever had....But still, that was the most costly bit. Borrowed a friends GPU to test to make sure everything else was working fine, and it turns out it looked like it was just the GPU.
And this all happened around Sept-Oct timeframe when new GPUs were far and few between. So starting with a bit of research, I decided on trying for a 3080 Strix - I needed the longer card and back-plate to work with my mount. And then after 3 weeks of trying to purchase one, I managed to lock in a 3090 off of New Egg while in line for the ferry. And in my haste, I did forget to select air shipping so I had to wait another 10 days for it to make it across the country, and finally it arrived!!!
tbc...