Hello to everyone.
As the title states, I own a GA-P55-UD3L rev2.0 motherboard (latest BIOS FI flashed) with an Intel Core i5-750 CPU.
Last week, I bought a Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SSD in order to use it as a boot device for my desktop (I know there is no SATA III port on my mobo but I bought it anyway to add some speed to my system) . However, I am having a very tough time with the setup.
I understand that I must enable AHCI mode from the BIOS in order for the SSD to work best, before installing OS (which is Windows 10 Pro 64bit). So I enabled AHCI mode and installed Win10. After a couple of minutes, the screen froze completely with no options for unfreezing (apart from a hard reset). I tried to boot up again a few times but the same thing happened. I tried changing SATA ports (all from 2_0 to 2_5), SATA calbes, PSU SATA connectors but still nothing. I also tested the PSU and the SSD on a bunch of systems, the are 100% healthy. I thought maybe its the AHCI/RAID drivers fault. Sadly, support from the gigabyte website only has AHCI/RAID drivers for Windows 7 64bit or older. And that is marked as "Preinstall"...
What drivers for AHCI/RAID controller should I get for Windows 10 64? Will the Windows 7 64 drivers be sufficient? And how do I install them BEFORE installing Windows? The AHCI driver should be updated before the OS is installed, am I right?
Could there be anything else that makes my setup freeze? All other components apart from the mobo (CPU, GPU, RAM modules) have been fully tested healthy and 100% working.
I haven't tried out the GSATA ports. Could someone be kind enough as to explain the difference between them and normal SATA ports? Do they use a different controller or something?
I thank you in advance for any possible answers.