Another day, another problem solved

Background

Bought new components to assemble:

• Motherboard: TUF Gaming x570-plus (wi-fi) with BIOS version 2.20.2407 (?)
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
• Video card: GeForce RTX 3080
• other bits and bobs

Problem

When boot up, the screen got stuck at 'press F2 or DEL to enter EFTI BIOS'; however, it does not respond to any keyboard events. It did respond to the keyboard a couple of times but eventually refused to respond and nothing seemed to worked - tried:

• removed SSD card(s) 
• reset CMOS by connecting the CLR jumper
• reset CMOS by removing the battery
• removed one of the RAM cards
• fingers crossed 😏
• toes crossed 😕
• cursing 😠
• 😖😡😢😣😩😱

Even after entering BIOS and changed boot sequence, when trying to install Windows 10, it got stuck at Windows logo and would not budge. 

Solution

Out of desperation, I whipped out my 10-year old video card from another computer and put it in instead. Upon boot up, et voila! I could go into the BIOS settings. Suspecting that the default BIOS firmware version did not support either the CPU or the graphics card, the first thing to do was to update the BIOS (into version 2.20.2607). After the update, it was smooth sailing - the Windows installation proceeded smoothly! Then it was a simply matter of swapping out the graphics card and continue with the driver downloads and setups.