Okay another update.
After just messing around with setting and looking around this site I switched bios back down to 044 instead of 046. Booted right up first time and has been on since then. I don't exactly know why this would make a difference, but it's on now and everything so far has been working just fine.
The specs I ended up going with are:
Intel DQ77KB
Intel i7-3770S
8GB Corsair Vengeance RAM
120GB SandDisk Extreme SSD
IOGear Bluetooth adapter
sata to esata adapter
2 different USB headers, one with just 1 port, the other with 4 which hasn't arrived yet
Apple Wireless Keyboard
Apple Magic Mouse
G4 Cube Speakers
The Power adapter is interesting...
For the power adapter, I purchased a refurbished Dell adapter that I read would fit this motherboard, it didn't. So I found a universal adapter that had the right tip, but I couldn't find one over 90W and I needed more power than that. So I cut them up and soldered them together.
I thought my soldering job went pretty good, works just fine cables don't overheat or anything. Was sad to put up a $50 universal charger though.
I forgot to take one of those fancy "here's all my parts" picture. But here is all the basics hooked up and running.
After BIOS update to 046 and install, this is the screen I would see if not booting in safe mode. I don't know if anyone can read the error message and make sense of what's actually happening.
As I said earlier I flashed the BIOS back to 044 and it booted right up. I'm not sure why, but it's working now. Mactester does have the suggestion of me using the MacMini 5,1 instead of 6,1 since it's currently working I haven't tried doing that yet.
I'm writing this post from the computer actually!
I'm not sure that flash drives are working out of the USB 3.0 ports but a wired keyboard is. Maybe just flash drives in general don't work or maybe it's just mine. The App Store sometimes works sometimes doesn't. I haven't been able to sign into iMessages yet, it keeps giving me errors. I've found tutorials on here explaining how to fix it and it seems easy enough.
Also a fun little side note, I do have a working wifi card! I months ago took the wifi card out of my ATV1 to replace it with a HD encoder and I kept it. I just tried throwing it into this motherboard and it worked right away! I haven't actually used it yet because the wires are still in the ATV1 and I haven't pulled them out yet, but it shows I have wifi and it will scan for networks.
Tonight I started working on the case a little, I cut out the heatsink and the IO shield. Tomorrow I will have time to play with the case some more and I can hopefully get it semi moved into the case tomorrow.
I'm going to mess with a couple of things then do some geekbench scores and things like that. I'll post those in a bit.
EDIT:
Just ran a geekbench and the score was:
11,869