Problem with MSI B650 tomahawk NVMe drives
Problem with MSI B650 tomahawk NVMe drives
So I have had my new AM5 platform for about 2 weeks well tonight I felt froggy so I went to best buy and got me a 3rd nvme drive for my board to populate all slots. I know according to the spec sheet 2 are cpu and 1 is chipset well this was just going to be another mass storage nvme drive so I put it in the slot that doesn't have a heatsink well anytime my system tries to access a drive for any kind of download doesn't mater what drive it is the screen goes black so I pulled that 3rd drive out issue stopped so I figured it was a bad drive. I took the drive back to best buy swapped it for another same issue but this time I put the drive into the slot that has the heatsink and took that other drive out worked fine. So my question is do I have a bad board or is there a flaw in how these were designed? I ask because up till today I had a 3rd drive using it inside of an enclosure plugged into a usb slot on the back of the board since it was a sata B+M key m.2 and what I did today was to get rid of that drive and have everything inside the pc. Specs below Ryzen 7 7700x Msi B650 tomahawk 2x16 gskill flare x5 5600mhz cas 36 Evga FTW3 RTX 3080 haven't had any issues with this board up till now and with my testing I know its not the drive. I have this same question posted on MSI's forum but figured id post here since I might get an answer faster
I believe my reasoning matches what others might think. With two Gen 3x4 drives in the system, eight PCIe lanes are filled, and the 16 lanes needed for the RTX 3080 seem to be exhausted. This could explain the issue you're experiencing. I didn't mention earlier that most USB Type A ports were unplugged, even though the board has 28 total ports. The extra four are reserved for the chipset, which might affect USB device compatibility.
If the slot you set with the third drive was the one without the heatsink, it would be M2_2, similar to M2_1, and directly linked to the CPU. M2_3 connects to the chipset. I believe if the drive functioned properly—appearing in BIOS and Windows—that wasn't the problem. Are you using the most recent BIOS?