PCIE 3.0 issue with Nvidia 660 ti

I spent 6 hours working on this last night..

Put together a new system last nigth (specs at the bottom), primarily with a P8Z77-V PRO and EVGA 660ti SC+. Got everything together, installed the os, chipset drivers, network driver, storage driver, audio driver, windows updates, then at the end, video drivers..

After I installed the video drivers (306.23) and rebooted, the system froze at the end of the windows logo. Rebooted again same thing. Rebooted into safe mode, uninstalled the driver, boots back into windows fine.

Ran driver cleanup util, and decide to try an older driver, same thing. Rinse repeat again with an older driver, and older driver, same thing.

Sometimes I don't even get any video output at all on reboot but can hear the windows loaded sound in the background (system is running but no video output). Reboot a few times and it comes back.

Finally just before I was about to give up, I hard set the board to PCIE 2.0.. and of course it boots up. Rebooted several times to verify, all is good. Ran occ, no issues. Switched it back to 3.0, and it hangs.

So, the cpu, board, gfx card, are pcie 3.0 compatible but the system refuses to run at pcie 3.0?

EVGA told me to just run pcie 2.0 because its not a significant performance loss... but it still feels broken to me so before I rma the card I just wanted to see if anyone knows about this?

i7-3770k
asus p8z77-v pro (latest bios)
16gb gskill qvl ram
rosewill 850w extreme psu
plextor m5s 128gb ssd

Default bios settings (no oc), everything pretty much auto.