Z390-E and 9700K will not boot with Nvidia GPU installed (2070 or 1070)

[pkincy]

Unfortunately I have a similar problem. Asus Maximus XI Hero Wifi Z390 or Strix Z370-E gaming as the board. EVGA 1070Ti card. 32 GB (4 sticks) of GSkill Ram. 850 watt EVGA psu. M.2 NVMEs (970 Evo 2 TB) in M.2-1 and in 2. Hypercard with NVME in 2 slots. Using SATA slot 3 and 4 for other SSDs. This has been an intermittent problem for me for about 6 months. Started with the Hero as a new build using peripherals from the Z370-E. That is where the problem started. Very slow boot with an even slower (5 min) to get in BIOS and when there it was frozen with no mouse or keyboard input that would operate it. Remove EVGA 1070 Ti and everything works perfectly. Since then I have gotten new memory, a new PSU, and changed the motherboard back to the Z370-E and still intermittently have the problem. The PC will boot into the OS after about 3 minutes and operate well. But anytime I need to get into BIOS I have to pull the graphics card. Last step was going back to the Z370-E with the new peripherals and it seems to be working with the GPU now. But who knows for how long.

I have pulled all but one M.2 drive and all but one 8GB stick and it works but not with the EVGA graphics card. Works fine with the igpu on either mobo. There seems to be some problem with M.2 NVME drives coupled with add in GPUs that are causing problems. I would really like to get this working with the Z390 Hero as I would like to add a 9900k chip, but may have to wait for the new Ryzens and try a different X570 board when they come out next month.

[pkincy]

It appears that the similarities among folks experiencing the booting/bios problem is that we each have both M.2 mobo slots populated and a graphics card in PCIE slot 16 x 1. Maybe we should share some bios settings to see if we can narrow down the problem.

As I currently only have Sata slots 3 and 4 filled I have both M.2-1 and M.2-2 running at x4 and am running the drives with Intel RST not AHCI. Somebody more knowledgeable than I should list the important bios items we should compare. There are obviously other important settings we should compare.

[Judge_Dredd_80]

Same here.
1. Intel 9700K in, nVidia 2080Ti in, m2 960 EVO in - no boot. CPU led on
2. m2 - out - PC boots correctly.
3. nVidia replaced with Radeon VII - PC boots correctly even with m2 drive...