@Iken :
Thanks for you report and congrats for having succeeded!
Although I haven’t tested the simultaneous usage of a discrete graphics card and an NVMe SSD myself (I don’t use a discrete graphics card), I am not sure regarding your conclusion.
Have you tried to insert the NVMe SSD and/or the graphics card into another PCIe slot? Our mainboard model has 3 PCIe X16 slots. If I were you, I would test all of them before going to sell the graphics card.
@Iken ,
As Fernando said, you have to do the proposed tests before to buy a new GPU card.
Your GTX960 card is a modern fully UEFI compliant card. Buying another more performant (expensive) card will not solve your problem.
On my Asus X99 I have a GTX980 coexisting with up to 4 NVMe devices (single or RAID organised). You have to check carefully the PCIe slot organisation, PCI lanes usage and BIOS settings.
@Fernando
@100PIER
Thanks for your replies.
100PIER: As I stated, I plan to buy additional RAM, not another graphics card; I may keep the GTX960, I may not (I haven’t decided yet).
With all due respect, how can you compare a Z68 board with an X99? They are worlds apart both in age and in UEFI functionality; the Z68 doesn’t even have full UEFI implementation as it was one of the earliest incarnations. I have researched this particular issue over two years via this excellent forum and my own investigation; I was only able to confirm in the last 48 hours or so as I’ve only just got the hardware to test with. I had an old Radeon card without UEFI compatibility when originally testing and the results with the GTX960 are almost identical.
PCIe16_3 on this board operates at a maximum of x4 and PCIe16_2 at x8; this is as per the manual. The optimum setup is using slot 1 and slot 2 as I had been using (each operating at PCIE 2.0 x8 maximum, though slot 1 or 2 with NVMe drops to PCIe2.0 x4); using PCIe16_3 at x4 speed (it defaults to x1) disables both PCIEx1 slots, USB3 ports 3 & 4 and the eSATA port which is no use to me as my external HDD is connected via eSATA and I would like to keep all USB3 ports available. Using 1 & 2 disables nothing and operates at highest performance.
I have already tried the GTX960 in slot 2 with the NVMe in slot 1 - same result, NO BOOT.
I respectfully stand by my statement unless corrected by others’ tests on the same board; using PCIex16_3 was discounted at the very beginning - too much is disabled and the low positioning of the slot in my installation negates proper cooling of the NVMe card/SSD and is unusable if the GTX960 is installed in slot 2 (dual-slot graphics card).
Best Regards
Fernando can you check this bios for me please: https://mega.nz/#!CU1hwSBS!vLC7VFHnWAUQw…BtX9s79Fpp7b8mc
@i2ocketron :
Your modded BIOS will not work, because you didn’t insert the NVMe module beyond the undermost of the listed DXE Drivers.
The undermost listed module is named “PcieLaneDXE”. So you have to right-click onto the GUID of that undermost module and to choose the option “Insert after…”.
This one looks good and can be flashed.
Hello, all. I have the Asrock X79 Extreme4-m motherboard plus Samsung 960pro and trying to make it bootable. I have checked all nvme dxes that found on this forum, but unsuccessfully. After flashing modded bios I found the device with name “PATA:”, but it’s still not bootable. Before the 960pro I have checked the previous 950pro ssd and it was bootable so I decided to upgrade.
Is there any owners of X79 mobo and 960pro that can boot linux on it?
@zxweed :
Welcome to the Win-RAID Forum!
The fact, that the BIOS has now detected your NVMe SSD, verifies, that you are very close to get the Samsung 960 Pro bootable.
Please follow all my advices given within the start post.
Good luck!
Dieter (alias Fernando)
I cant find this "PcieLaneDXE" in my bios followed the directions, but i still cant seem to find it in my bios 5001 R4F mb help!!
@nolife4life :
Welcome to the Win-RAID Forum!
You should search for the undermost listed "DXE Driver", however it is named. There is no reason to search for a specific module, which has been accidentally the undermost "DXE Driver" within the BIOS of another mainboard.
Regards
Dieter (alias Fernando)
thanks for replying so fast what do you mean by undermost listed ,i have been following your guide on how to do this.
(undermost listed) by taking out one of the dxe driver that is not needed.??thanks
@Fernando :
I did it yay!!! I looked at the picture on Insertion of the NVMe module and seen on the right side under text and read what it said (asus_euppei) and put the NVME module in that area since I have a asus mb, and bam!! It worked ,and it came up as pata ss in bios under boot screen.loaded windows 10 64 home.with raid 0 on for my other ssds and all is great.so far. thanks fernando for the help
EDIT by Fernando: Fully quoted post replaced by directly addressing to its author (to save space) and inserted picture moved into the next line (for better readability)
Thanks, @Fernando , I have found the problem - UEFI boot from the USB setup distro was not worked. After fix it and boot setup stick in UEFI mode I can install the OS and reboot successfully. I have also checked the samsung_m2_dxe.ffs, but it was not worked for 960pro (still no PATA-device in the boot list.)
EDIT by Fernando: Unneeded fully quoted post removed (to save space)
@zxweed :
Thanks for your feedback! It is fine, that you finally succeeded.
This module is only usable with M.2 Samsung SSDs, which are using the "AHCI" interface.
Well… the Dell T3610 is a big fat no. Extracting the actual bios from the Dell exe is fine, modding the bios file is fine but getting that back onto the board is only going to be done with a programming jig or figuring a way to recompress it back into a dell exe BIOS update with a valid checksum signature. On this machine its a weird setup with a 4.65 amibios that reports as Insyde and is fully protected from unsigned attempts at flashing it in any way. I tried setting the mobo to factory service mode (it actually has a jumper for that), password bypass/reset mode, every flash utility possible (either error 46 for wrong type, or write protected error). Dell packages their own custom flash utility loosely based on some version of afu. I even tried downgrading it to a very low BIOS version from before Dell got caught with the security issue with their BIOS, tried connecting up a sata SSD temporarily and installign Windows 10, then run a legit flash from Dell, at shutdown kill the power, pulled the SSD and explored everywhere, not in the hidden efi partition nor the hidden recovery partition, nor in the visible windows partition. When you run the official Dell bios update it apparently loads the new rom directly into the UEFI flash file system on the board to install on the next boot. The on board UEFI flash also has a built in flash update utility you can select from the F12 boot menu and then select a bios update file from any attached file system but it will only accept a Dell exe bios update.
Oh well, its not a huge deal for me. These T3610’s will still cruise long nicely with a SATA ssd and I can still use the NVMe SSD’s in them for ultra fast secondary storage. Or I can always use one of the couple of alternate bootloader methods to preload NVMe drivers. Thats just not nearly as elegant as native NVMe support though.
Interestingly Dell released a new BIOS for it this morning too to address the Meltdown/Spectre bugs. I imagine pretty much every mainstream vendor and mobo manufacturer will probably release BIOS updates for even 5+ year old models for that. Lets just hope the fixes do not drag machines down too much by forcing the needed updates. By changing the predictive speculation it will hit older machines (haswell and earlier processors) running anything below Windows 10 the hardest with very noticeable drops on system speed and performance. 
Oh and its also going to have a big impact on AMD and ARM processor based machines as well including cell phones, tablets, etc.
Hey I was just going to buy a regular ssd but i saw there was a possibility to buy a SAMSUNG 960 EVO M.2 500GB for roughly $207 and its so much faster. But i have a old mobo and i found this thread.
I saw from this thread gigabyte has released a new bios that included the NVME support?
https://github.com/al3xtjames/coreboot_m…x-ud5h/issues/2
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-…v-10#support-dl
Sorry a noob to this…since i dont have a port for the m.2 nvme drive i would need to buy an adapter right?
would this one work or is there a better one?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MYC…CNFUPOJB&psc=1?
my specs
Operating System
Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
CPU
Intel Core i7 2600K @ 3.40GHz 40 °C
Sandy Bridge 32nm Technology
RAM
16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 934MHz (9-9-9-24)
Thanks for a beautifully written guide! Had some troubles looking at all the screenshots though because it said something expired in german.
I have a Supermicro X9DRi-LN4F+ motherboard and I have modified the BIOS with the first NVME option and successfully flashed it.
The device shows up as P ATA SS: in boot, perfect.
However, I want to install CentOS instead of Windows. I have tried to install it through UEFI USB I can’t seem to get it boot directly. Do you have any advice for me?
@MixManSC :
Thanks for your report about the difficulties to recompress the modded Dell BIOS file into a working Dell *.exe file.
I am pretty sure, that somewhere there is already published a solution, but it may not be easy to find it.
Good luck!
@gladroger :
Welcome to the Win-RAID Forum and thanks for your feedback!
Yes, that was/is a temporary bug within our Forum software, but it should have been already fixed. I am sorry about this inconvenience.
Although I don’t know anything about this OS, I found >this< YouTube video about this topic. Maybe it will help you to solve this problem.
Good luck!
Dieter (alias Fernando)
Thank you so much, got it working! Had to choose UEFI OS under UEFI Devices in Boot.
Got these results with hdparm. Samsung 960 Pro M.2
/dev/mapper/centos-home:
Timing cached reads: 17926 MB in 2.00 seconds = 8975.41 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 5920 MB in 3.00 seconds = 1973.00 MB/sec
[root@m2 ~]#