Intel Motherboards : Z170 Extreme 7+/Samsung 950 PRO Freezing

Thanks for your replies. I didn't get any emails about them so I apologize for the delay. I want to preface this reply with I have resolved the issue completely and it is a very strange cause. But first, I wanted to follow up with your questions.

I was trying to load the inf that was exacted from that installer. I gave up on installing that driver during installation as I read elsewhere that it doesn't need to be done.

Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. parsec wrote: Your video of the freezing, or really what I saw in your Device Manager screen, is bothering me. That is, all the bad entries under Other Devices. Unless you did not install ANY of the essential software and drivers yet, you should not have any of those bad entries in Device Manager.

That was a fresh install with no drivers or software installed. Learning from Win10 and it's love for installing drivers via WU, I read that the best way to install drivers is via audit mode. Plus I am little anal when it comes to the fact that OOBE doesn't ask you what timezone you are in unless you came from audit mode. Your way also works - just habit.

Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. parsec wrote: Did you run the two installation packages I listed above? Again, which NVMe driver did you load during the Windows installation?

I religiously always install the chipset and ME drivers first, then RST, audio, video and NIC last. It was the latest version from Samsung's site (I don't have the version handy at the moment.

As explained above, just for driver installation and timezone option during OOBE (minor).

It was installed in M.2_1 which took SATA_0 and SATA_1 away.

Now onto the resolution. I spent the entire day trying to troubleshoot the problem. With it freezing like that, I knew it had to be hardware. There is no way software could do this (at least with my past knowledge). Since the only driver installer that would cause the crash was the NIC driver, I started by disabling both NICs in the BIOS. Tried to cause the freeze and it didn't freeze up (yes!). So, my idea was that one or both NICs are faulty (unusual but ok - maybe it got a surge). So, I enabled one and tried again. Froze. Both are bad? Left one on for the remainder of my testing.

At this point, I somewhat ruled out the NICs. So, I started unplugging everything - HDDs, optical drives, my USB devices (which is just a webcam and CD printer) and booted with just the M.2. NO FREEZING. Yes!! So, started plugging stuff back in slowly. My friend informed me that he has seen optical drives cause these types of issues. so with everything plugged back in (except the optical drives), I still had no freezing. I plugged one of them in (I have two) and it froze. Ah ha!

Turns out, I caused the issue myself. Because the M.2 takes up two SATA ports, I had to shift everything down and ended up putting both my optical drives in the ASMedia SATA bus. Turns out that the ASMedia SATA bus does not support ATAPI. I have since moved the optical drives back to the Intel SATA ports, re-enabled both NICs and disabled the ASMedia SATA bus and there has been no freezing at all.

What a pain that was and I caused it all myself by trying to keep everything plugged in and making sure that my SSD and HDDs were on the "good" bus.

Thanks for the help and time.

Brandon