as the title says, this is freshly built. I hit the power button, I see the asus spash screen that says to press F2 or Del button to get me into the uefi bios. After pressing those buttons nothing happens.

I've press F1 on this screen but still, nothing happens. Still though, when I press Ctrl+Alt+Del it restarts the PC. I'm using a usb keyboard, do I need to use PS/2 Keyboard or something?

Any thoughts or ideas? My best guess is to use a ps/2 keyboard but I don't have one around, but before I go and buy one, I want to know if there is something I've overlooked.

Did you try other USB ports?

yea i tried all of them, 3.0 and 2.0 ports, and the ones on the motherboard.

He found your keyboard, shouldn't be a problem. However, it might be that Bios has first to initialize the keyboard, so pushing any button before that's done will then do nothing. You can often find an USB port marked with a keyboard, that one should work normally.

On the other hand, Bios is so fast these days that in some computers all you need are lightning reflexes to trigger. Still, I would recommend trying with a non-USB keyboard if you can't enter UEFI Bios with your USB keyboard.

I believe that the BIOS does not have USB legacy support enabled so it's highly likely that you'll need a PS/2 keyboard to access the BIOS ...

The good news is that your boot up screen isn't spewing out garbage so that rules out that your BIOS is corrupted ...

I still would try to reset the bios first. It would be ridicululous for a current mainboard to require legacy ports.
Try to find a reset button or bios battery. Check the manual for the mainboard.

tried reseting bios, did not work. going to try ps/2 kb in a few mins.

Looking at your load screen, I can imagine there are going to be a lot of bios settings to go through, but you just might have to do that.

The problem was the keyboard. Solved it by using a different usb keyboard.

New problem. After updating the bios and setting my configurations, I "Save & Exit" but it constantly boots to UEFI Bios Utility instead.

It's been a while since I've messed around in Bios settings. My first thought would be to check the cmos battery, but I see that's not that important anymore nowadays. I guess setting the boot sequence isn't either? Should be boot from dvd anyway, not from the empty hdd.

Good luck. Can't help you much more than bump the thread.