Gigabyte AORUS Master X670E with 3 or more NVME drives = no complete boot

[ozbitty]

Greetings,

I thought I would ask if anyone else here has an Aorus Master X670E motherboard and is running 3 or more NVME drives using the onboard NVME connectors?

With two drives installed, everything works beautifully. The system is zippy (7950X3D), performance is great. The moment I installed two additional NVME’s (connected to chipset) the BIOS just sticks on the init screen.

I have found a few posts by others on reddit with the same issue, but this is going almost a year back so a problem of that nature would have caused lots of people to have issues.

I can get all 4 NVME drives working when two of them are using PCIe to NVME adaptors, but this is not practical.

Gigabyte support thinks the board is faulty and needs to be returned to place of purchase (or in my case Gigabyte service center).

Oddly enough when I have the board configured with my preferences it boots fine’ish with 4 NVME’s from a completely powered off state, however restart and it locks up on the aorus splash screen. Also locks up from cold boot when the defaults are loaded.

As this is my first AM5 system I do not have other AM5 hardware to compare/test AM5 specific parts. The NVME’s do work in other systems, and the latest BIOS release makes no difference to operation.

[diizzy]

Does it still occur if you lower PCIE to Gen4 or 3?

[ozbitty]

The PCIE gen4/3 settings appear to only reference the pcie ports and not the nvme ports as far as I can tell.

Assuming it did fix the issue, any time a bios update is done, and the settings reset, it would require removing the GPU to remove the NVME to allow me to get into the BIOS (when the bios locks up you cannot access the bios configuration)

I did test by installing two Samsung EVO 970 Plus’ which are gen3 and while it did get past the bios screen windows had its spinning loading graphic for 20 minutes … so I figured it was going to spin indefinitely and powered down.

[grimsfield]

just curious if you ever figured this out?

[Jersey_Johnny]

I have the same cpu and motherboard and am using 4 m.2 drives. 2 inland 2tb pcie5 drives,and 2 samsung pro 990 gen4 drives.

I haven’t expeirenced the issues you are having. Im running a 32GB trident ddr5 6000mhz ram kit, (the only bios changes i’ve made were turning on the rams expo1 profile, and running a negative 20 undervolt). My C0 runs @5325mhz, and C1 @ 5725.

The never touched anything to do with my m.2 drives at all. Its possible you have a faulty motherboard if your up to date with your bios and its still not working for you.
Where in our bios can you lower the PCIE to anything other then PCIE5? I know that two of our m.2 slots are for gen5 m.2 drives, and 2 m.2 slots are gen4, but there isn’t anything for us to change or setup. You can put a gen 4 drive in the gen 5 slot and the drive will run fine. However, if you accidentaly have a gen5 drive in a pcie4 slot, maybe that can cause an issue. I’m not sure. My guess is you have already checked to make sure you have the drives in the correct ports, but I would remove all my m.2 drives except the one gen5 m.2 drive that you have windows on. Try booting with it in the first spot, if that doesn’t work, try booting with it in the second gen5 port.

Also , make sure in your bios you changed the bootup settings to pcie5 SSD , not m.2. In the bios , it refers to my gen5 m.2 drives as pcie5, and my gen 4 m. 2 drives are called m.2 drives. so just make sure you have it set to boot to the correct drive.

The nightmare I still to this day deal with is boot time. Even wtih all my settings, and amazing cpu peformance, it still takes me 61 seconds to boot into windows and i’ve tried all the settings for turning off memory learning etc.

im running on bios F21 1/10/2024. There is a newer bios released the other day, but I haven’t upgraded to it because I don’t see it saying anything about fixing memory startup times, so i’m staying with F21.

Are you booting into windows fast? it really sucks that ddr5 memory running at 6000mhz causes boot times to crawl , when my other two am4 PC’s boot up in 9 and 11 seconds.

[Jersey_Johnny]

I just found this out after the nightmare of having to remove my giant graphics card, then the m.2 heat sinks, just to remove the cmos battery to reset.
Our motherboards have a programmable button on the lower right hand side, close to where the cmos jumpers are located. You can set it to bios. and now if i have issues like we have been talking about, i dont need to short out the jumper , or remove the cmos battery, I can just push the button . Its in our manual ,but in the bios you’ll find where you can click on the drop down menu and change the button to do different things. All of which are helpful. ( This is not the button near the LED code screen). figured id just let you know incase you didn’t , i just found out about it this past month. lol