Reboot to black screen with ROG STRIX Z690-E GAMING WIFI

[Oafed]

Some additional bits of information:

- When it reboots to black and I switch the cable to the iGPU - I see that the Nvidia GPU does NOT show up in device manager under Display Adapters. Its like it was completely not discovered by the motherboard at all.

- I'll try and play around later and move around my two m2 drives and maybe switch the GPU slot. Feels like there is some sort of race condition in the bios with PCIE device discovery, so maybe moving things to different places might be a workaround for the problem.

[Oafed]

-- WORKAROUND FOUND --

I had two m2 drives installed in M.2_1 and M.2_2. I moved them to M.2_2 and M2_3. This proved to be an effective workaround for the GPU not detected on reboot bug in the motherboard. I strongly suspect that I could have instead moved the GPU from G5 to G3 - however I did not want to do that.

It is very unfortunate that such a high end motherboard has this nasty of a bug, but hopefully this workaround helps anyone else who finds this thread and has the same problem.

* Edit *
I also noticed in the motherboard manual that an SSD in M.2_1 actually gimps the PCIE on G5 from running 16 lanes down to 8 lanes. What a horrible design for what appears to be the primary M2 slot and the primary GPU slot to smash each other!! So I'm glad I made this change anyways!

[RogScott]

Interesting find!

That may explain why I never saw the problem. When I built my Z690-E, I purposely avoided M.2_1 because I had read about x8 limitation on Slot G5. I instead used M.2_2, M.2_3, and the M.2 Hypercard included with the motherboard.

I suspect many Z690-E owners read of the x8 issue and did the same thing, so probably few people actually using M.2_1. It's a shame, since it has the best heatsink and is potentially faster with pcie5 support.

Sure sounds like a bios bug, i.e., not detecting/initializing the discrete gpu card correctly with M.2_1 occupied. I did experience some issues with the bios dual-gpu / primary-gpu settings when I had the iGPU enabled, so I suspect there are multiple issues in that section of the bios.

[STARRAIN@ROG]

Hi Oafed,
May I have the following information?
- the serial number of your motherboard via PM
- the brand and model name of your CPU, ram, PSU, monitors and drives in M.2_1 and M.2_2
(Please check the specific model name of ram such as G.SKILL F4-4600C18D-16GTRG.)
- How often did it restart to black? like once in three times
- OS build of 22H2 Windows 11
- graphics driver version
Thank you.