New board M.2 drive and RAM problems

[TanyaC]

Hello,

I purchased a X99-Phoenix SLI motherboard. The system has a Samsung 950 Pro 512gb NVMe  SSD, a Samsung 850 Pro 512gb SATA SSD and a Seagate ST2000VN000 NAS spinner. The CPU is a I7-6900K and the memory is G.Skill F4-3200C16Q-32GTZB.

Both the SSD and RAM are listed on Gigabyte's QVL's which is why I selected this motherboard.

I previously had a MSI X99A XPower AC, but the cooling options are atrocious. It works fine, just you can't customize the cooling very well. No problems booting, over clocking or any other issues.

The Phoenix was on F3 BIOS which I had to update to even get it to even do a POST (It was making continuous short beeps). So now it's on F5f. I could then start the computer with the RAM running @ 2133.

But as soon as the boot process got to loading Windows and reading the 950 Pro it would hang.

I was planning to reinstall Windows 7 anyway, I booted off the USB drive. But again, as soon as it tried to detect the 950 it just froze. So I booted from DVD and got the same thing. I tried UEFI and non-UEFI boots. Neither worked.

I removed everything and added things back one at a time, until I got to the 950 and it hung again.

So I put the 950 in a Z170-Extreme 4 board. Boots no problems. I did a secure erase on the 950 and tried again. No luck.

Whilst I was trying various things I also set the RAM to XMP @ 3200. The system would not even do a POST. It just did nothing.

So bottom line - The phoenix won;t work with the 950 pro, and won't work with the RAM on anything higher than 2133.

Sound like a DOA motherboard?

Have I missed anything?

thanks for your assistance

[shadowsports]

The 950 NvME should be supported by on this board.  The RAM if indeed on the QVL should also be supported, but will require some OC to run full speed.  I'd stay at 2133Mhz for now if you can and tackle one issue at a time.  Probably wise in this case to flash up to the latest BIOS.  X99 are extremely finicky.

I'd disconnect power.  Perform a battery pull.  Wait a few minutes and attempt the install again.

Ensure the drive is detected in BIOS or you'll be banging your head against the wall.   

Regardless of the OS you install (7,8,10).  You will need to provide drivers to the OS so it can detect the drive/storage controller during install.   

This one on a FAT32 formatted USB stick - 14.8.0.1042
http://download.gigabyte.us/FileList/Driver/mb_driver_intel_bootdisk_irst_64_x99_refresh.zip

Attempt install with the least number of changes to the BIOS.  There are a million ways you can go depending on the OS, Secure Boot, or how you are going to format MBR, GPT.  Not going to go into this as I assume you have an idea what to do based on your hardware choices. We have other X99 users here.  Let us know your progress and we can try to get more eyes on this.