GA Z490 ELITE OC7.8 Monterey 12.2.1 questions

[HackinMax]

I've had quite the battle with this build which was unusually resistant to installing Monterey. But, I finally got it to accept 12.2.1 using OC7.8 and thought the worst was over. It's not.

I still have two outstanding issues with the build. So, I am asking if there are any suggestions how to solve these two issues:

1) It wakes from sleep. But, wake is incredibly slow, taking about 30 seconds before the screen wakes. (Worked fine under Catalina). Occasionally, bluetooth just quits. No way to get it back short of a reboot.
Apps such as Hackintool and random others (Brave is another that immediately comes to mind) only show a blank screen and are unresponsive after wake. Requires shut down and restart.

Here is some data from the pm system.

pmset -g                           
System-wide power settings:
Currently in use:
standby              1
Sleep On Power Button 1
womp                 0
hibernatefile        /var/vm/sleepimage
proximitywake        0
powernap             0
gpuswitch            2
networkoversleep     0
disksleep            10
standbydelayhigh     86400
sleep                1 (sleep prevented by bluetoothd)
hibernatemode        0
ttyskeepawake        1
displaysleep         30
highstandbythreshold 60
standbydelaylow      86400

2) I tried to drop a Sapphire RX 6600XT GPU in the build. It 'should' work natively. But, it only boots to black screen after the OC picker and a few seconds on the apple logo progress screen. This is with both current and older versions of WeG. I tried every port on the card. But, for some reason it will not light up. This was the ONE thing that I thought would work without a hitch. (Currently back to my RX 5700XT)

3) A third general question regards the Kraken X65. I wonder; is the USB connection necessary for our purposes? It seems to be just a connection for software control, which is not possible with macOS. If I could safely disconnect that, I think it would help overall. But, I don't know exactly what the consequences of disconnecting it might be.

Thanks for looking.