I just built a new PC and I'm trying to figure out a weird NVMe issue.

Specs:

• Gigabyte B550M AORUS ELITE AX Rev. 1.4
• Ryzen 7 5700X
• RX 9060 XT 16GB
• 2x8GB G.Skill Trident Z DDR4-3200
• 750W PSU
• WD_BLACK SN7100 NVMe SSD

On the very first boot, everything worked and I got into BIOS. I enabled XMP, saved and exited, and then got a black screen.

I've since cleared CMOS and successfully Q-Flash Plus updated the BIOS. BIOS now shows F8b.

I eventually discovered something strange:

With the SN7100 removed:

• PC boots normally
• I get BIOS display
• XMP can be enabled and works normally
• BIOS shows the expected 16GB RAM

With the SN7100 installed:

• PC powers on normally
• Fans/RGB work
• No display at all
• Same result with both DisplayPort and HDMI
• Same result in both M.2 slots

The BIOS NVMe configuration says "no NVMe device" when the SSD is removed, as expected.

The SSD was installed when I originally enabled XMP, so I'm wondering if the two events were related somehow. However, I can now enable XMP successfully with the SSD removed, so XMP itself seems to work.

Could a faulty SN7100 cause the motherboard to hang during POST/BIOS initialization like this? I don't have another desktop to test the SSD in.

The SN7100 is a PCIe Gen4 M.2 drive, which should be compatible with this motherboard