SOLVED - just to share for learnings - it wasn't too loose/tight, I was using the wrong pins on the mboard for the cooler pump.

The gigabyte mboard I have does not have a specific set of pins label ...

Thank you VERY much for this advice. I'll give this a shot. I actually am seeing it heat up even in bios at least once, went to 130 degrees celsius.

My concern is tightening too hard - I don't wa ...

Hmm. I'm a fairly experienced PC builder, I've been struggling with a new AMD build.

To keep this short for now - When booting into Windows 10 or Windows 11, everything is fine for about 5 minutes. ...