EVO 970 NVME Help - Maximus XI Hero WiFi

Hi all,

I am brand new to this whole building a computer thing and may have gotten a little over my comfort zone. I successfully built my first PC from the ground up and I was excited to use an M.2 NVME drive for my OS. Currently, I have Windows 10 loaded onto the M.2 and for whatever reason I am experiencing the following struggles:

VERY slow boot times... I am talking like between 40 seconds to 2 minutes which I know is horribly slow for an M.2 drive. My old computer had a SSD and it booted within seconds. I first installed the M.2 into the slot near the CPU M.2_1 then I talked to a rep at ASUS and they said to move it to the M.2_2 (i didnt have a screw for it to hold place so I just threw the heat sink shield on and screwed it in) so I did. I then changed SATA mode selection from Intel RST to AHCI. I then changed the M.2_1 config to PCIE . Windows shows the drive but has the Microsoft Drivers - Not sure how to get the best performance from my m.2.

Which slot should it be in? M.2_1 or M.2_2?

What do I do in BIOS to run as fast as possible for great boot times?

Windows says the newest driver for the M.2 is installed (Microsoft version) so how do I get the Samsung one installed?

I bought Windows 10 but I saw online it might have to be a bootable UEFI version?

Thank you in advance for this as I am a complete newbie to this and I couldn't really find a solution online.

Sad you didn’t got a reply. I as well installed a cloned evo NMVE but bios settings are unclear to me how the SSD can be bootable. I connected my previous SSD via SATA 1, and that works fine. The seller told me that M.2_1 is for 2280 model SSD but whatever I change in the bios, no boot on the NVME. And yeah...boot time is slow. I am sure it’s a bios setting, but can’t find the answer