Greetings! I'm finally breaking down to ask my question here. Its been a few weeks of trouble shooting.
My specs - 27 iMac mid 2011 I replaced the CPU with a Xeon E3-1275 before messing with the gpu. It was super easy, and worked right away. I then bought a Dell nVidia Quadro K3100M 4GB card and flashed it with the Linux usb stick and the correct ROM from the first post on this thread.
I have boot screen, I can use the apple boot selector, and the apple hardware test. This configuration also worked fine with Ubuntu. My problem is, I cannot boot all the way into macOS. The hard drive currently has High Sierra, I also have a patched Catalina usb booter with dosdude's patcher. When booting into these, and the recovery, I get the apple chime, the apple logo, the progress bar gets to 70% and then a brighter white screen appears for a while and then eventually a black screen. I've tried to patch the hard drive (on another mac) with the AppleGraphicsControl kext provided for fixing the black screen. This did not solve my problem.
I saw somewhere on the thread that if the progress bar gets to 70% and then black screen means the gpu is dying, but it works fine in Ubuntu and the apple hardware test didn't have any errors.
Thanks a ton for this thread, despite frustration I'm enjoying this!
Oh, ps when on verbose mode, it completes and lands me on the white screen. (not sure how verbose is used)