Hello all who read this,
But the issue has been resolved, which turns out to be the primary gpu issue with unraid/vfio systems. What is strange is that this issue occured with the 1080 as the second gpu in the system and lead me not to consider this.
solution is here: Is it even possible to pass through my primary GPU? What am i doing wrong? - #5 by brandon3055
tldr; issue was gpu passthrough as the primary card but setting boot options as such:
Hope this helps any unfortunate soul wander upon the internet, and my thanks to both Wolf and Brandon for figuring this out previously