So, I took apart the 3090 KPE Hydro Copper to clean the inside of it today. It was a terrible pain in the butt; almost as horrible as the 2080 Ti FTW3 Hydro Copper was. It really feels like EVGA does this on purpose to keep people from taking them apart, which makes no sense at all. People need to be able to maintain the products they buy and taking apart a waterblock for cleaning is normal maintenance. When I needed to clean the 2080 Ti FTW3 Hydro Copper block a second time, I learned from EVGA that they did not sell replacement o-rings for Hydro Copper blocks, so I sold it and replaced it with an EKWB GPU block. Unfortunately, the Kingpin model has only two options available, both difficult to acquire because of limited availability and both overpriced.
Getting the o-ring back in place was a complete nightmare. The plexi has a shallow groove for it and it tries to pop out of the groove. The first time I reassembled it and leak-tested it had a leak because the o-ring slipped a tiny bit. Everything turned out fine in the end, but it was far more hassle than it should have been. This makes me angry, and causes me to think it would be best to avoid buying enthusiast grade video cards in the future and stick with less expensive generic reference PCB GPUs with multiple waterblock options and just shunt mod and voltage mod them for better overclocking.