There were a few things that made this installation unnecessarily difficult.
1) The instructions are garbage because the instructions that came with the waterblock were just generic instructions for any card. I looked on barrow's website and they have dedicated instructions but are still not good. I found a few helpful things like thermal pad placement. Doesn't show replacing any thermal pads onto the back plate.
2)The instructions were unclear which screws to use. I ended up using spring screws with the clear washers only where the waterblock attaches to the board. I believe there were 9 in total but i'm not 100% positive.
3)If you look at the picture above, it shows thin blue strips that they say NEED to be cut to size. They do not supply you with the narrow strips to cut so you would have to cut the wide blue strips to fit a small strip. I left the stock thin evga pads in instead but used the full size blue where indicated. I didn't want to deal with attempting to cut thin long strips and the evga thermal pads seemed to be super soft high quality.
4)The backplate - I left the backplate thermal pads in tack instead of replacing them. If i replaced them with the supplied blue pads, they might have worked but i didn't want to chance it. As a side effect due to using the original pads, the black spacers are not big enough to allow the corners of the back plate to be tightened down a lot. I'm not entirely sure using the blue strips would rectify this issue. If you tighten the corners down, the middle of the backplate will bow and the thermal pads will not make contact correctly with the memory. You have to be extra careful when tightening the corners down and not tightening them too much.
After all that is said and done I used a ek water leak tester and left it for 40 minutes. No leaks so that's good.
looking at the mem temps, I'm surprised that there's a decent temp difference between the memory and the gpu. gpu2 is showing similar temps to the memory which makes me wonder if it's due to the supplied thermal pads. I haven't researched what others are reporting with other waterblocks so idk if this is normal or not. Overall I see a 10c drop in mem temps over the stock ftw3 ultra cooler set to 90% fan speed.
If I were to do this again, I probably wouldn't buy this kit UNLESS I desperately wanted to keep the factory back plate which I wanted to do. I wish I had the patience to have waited for the heatkiller.