Ryzen NVMe as boot drive problems

3rrant · August 18, 2019

I recently changed my SSD/HDD configuration in my system, taking out some old drives and moving my platform to a NVMe drive from a SATA ssd, both from the Samsung EVO lineup.

My system is a Ryzen 1700 + RX580 + 16GB ram, but however I somehow completely forgot that I had some issues when I originally built it (first week when 1st was avaiable) using a NVMe boot drive and that was the reason I stepped down to SATA back then.

So, maybe now that the platform is more mature there is finally a way to understand what's happening: My current problem with a NVMe drive is that AFTER the initial Windows 10 setup, the system only works correctly for a few minutes/hours, then a number of stange things start happenings and ends up with total crash and boot failures with blue screens. These problems usually are:

No video/intermittent video output.
Extremely laggy keyboard/mouse inputs, expecially in games.
Wrong colors displayed on the screen.
System becames unstable and stucks of easy tasks, like opening a folder.
Unable to finish benchmarks of any kind, without a specific error. Sometimes with a blue screen so fast that before the smiling face appears the system just reboots itself.
Immediate blue screen or shutdown when Windows loads up.

The weird thing is that this ONLY happens with a NVMe boot drive (OC or non-OC, it doesn't matter). I tried two in total, very different one from the other, one years ago when I built it and one now. After swapping back in my SATA SSD (which I didn't already erase, thankfully) the system is back at 100% functionality without problems, even overclocked.

I tried to re-install Windows, drivers and softwares multiple times on the NVMe ssd... no luck. The system gets stuck in this loop not immediately, but in less than one or two days for sure. BIOS is at latest version. The PSU is a 1200W Platinum EVGA unit, so it's not about current, I think.

Ideas?