Thanks for trying to help, but yeah I do have cores isolated from host and pinned to VM. Its one of the first things I adjusted. I even tried different combinations of cores isolated and pinned with the same results.
BIOS updates are another issue... I tried that weeks ago and any BIOS update past the one I'm currently on simply doesn't work correctly. Cannot access UEFI at all. Oddly enough the firmware update must have worked since I can boot into my Windows NVME just fine, just cannot access UEFI to change anything to get unraid to boot from usb... so that's a no-go. In case you were curious: https://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=32460&PID=114573