Hi all,
TL;DR - Force PCIe to run @ Gen 3.
I've been a little out of the loop on hardware. I decided to upgrade my old 780 with a 1070 and 1080. I don't SLI and wanted to run a bunch of monitors (3x 27" 1440p and 2x 55" 4k TVs - I'm a productivity person) and try one of each video card. Overkill, yeah, probably, but I had an itch that needed scratching.
I swapped my 780 with the new cards and also added in a USB3.1 A + C card as well. I already had a 10GB nic in there.
I had all kinds of problems after that. Sometimes the motherboard would not get past error code b2 and sometimes it would hang loading Windows.
I searched high and low for hours. I knew the motherboard and at least the 1080 worked as seen on Legit Reviews. In that example they were using a 4960X. Eventually I stumbled upon a forum post where someone was having a similar issue on a 980.
First thing recommended was updating the BIOS. Which I did too (as of Aug, 2016) version 1704. That did not help the situation. The next thing they recommended was to look at the PCIe settings in the BIOS. The board supports Auto, Gen 1, Gen 2 and Gen 3. The OP eventually gave up and built a new system. However, I tried the settings and built a new system.
I wanted to post this in case there was another crazy fool out there trying to do something similar.
Hope this helps, c0d1st