For the past couple months I have been collecting parts to build a new PC. I have not built a PC in about 10-12 years now since I jumped over to the Apple ecosystem. I have been trying to get my hands on a PlayStation 5 in what feels like forever. I have gotten close a few times but no dice. My son has a PlayStation 4 and I wanted the new console so I could play games with him as he is in another state. Well I finally gave up on trying for a PlayStation, even the PS4s are impossible to find right now. So I decided to build for gaming instead. Most of the games these days are cross-play compatible so no need to have a console it just would have been nice. I transitioned from PC gaming to consoles a long time ago, when I got kids. It was just easier but I do miss it. So back at it I go #PCMasterRace!
I landed a fantastic deal on a Asus Tuf Z690-Plus Wireless D4 Motherboard which I paired with an Intel i5-12600K processor. I tossed in some Corsair Vengeance Pro 3600 memory (32GB, and the RGB enhancement kit) and topped it all off with an Asus Tuf AiO water cooler. I decided since I was building a pretty recent machine (hardware wise) I wanted to kind of go all out as, much as my wallet would let me anyway so I bought a Samsung 980 Pro 1TB M2 SSD and OMFG is this thing fast, and this SSD is why I am making this post…
My brand new motherboard would not see the M2 drive. I tried every setting I could possibly find in the BIOS and yes I did update the BIOS, it was quite old for how new the board is actually. Still no dice. It would not show up as a detected drive but I could see it listed as a physical device that was connected to the board so it was working, right? Just nothing would see it, the board nor the Windows installer. I searched for like 10hours and found a lot of others that have also had issues with this drive in particular, some of them ended up have to exchange the drive and the replacement worked. Some replaced it with another brand. As it was nearing 4am I was about to give up for the day (I had even posted to Reddit asking for help with real no luck) and I found a post stating that Samsung doesn’t even have an official driver for the drive, they used the Intel driver. So I went over to Intel and downloaded the driver for (current at this time) 12th generation processors, slapped it on a thumbdrive and loaded the Windows installer, loaded the driver and it saw my SSD immediately and Windows installed without a hitch. On reboot the drive also now shows up normally in my motherboards BIOS. Ran some speed tests in Windows 10 and I am hitting the numbers quoted by everyone else and seen in those fantastic screenshots. This thing is fast! Game loading times are damn near non-existent. Its beautiful! And whats better, is that my board supports four of these bastards! This rig will never see mechanical drives.
Intel® Rapid Storage Technology Driver Installation Software with Intel® Optane™ Memory (11th and 12th Gen Platforms)
I downloaded and used the driver named “
XMP Memory Issues
Since I’m talking about my new build and the issues I came across I have another one for ya. I purchased 32gb (2×16) of Corsair Vengeance Pro 3600 RGB memory that supports XMP. But I could not get XMP to work properly. If I enabled XMP the system would consistently hang on boot in safe mode with an error stating that the memory has issues with its current settings. After some Redditing I found out some people had to manually set the voltage for the sticks but I also saw someone mention to simply switch RAM slots. That the modules needed to be in the other RAM banks on the motherboard (A2B2 banks – slots 2 & 4, on my board they’re the grey slots not the black slots). Once I moved the sticks to those slots and enabled XMP everything worked just fine and I am getting the proper speeds out of my memory now.
So if you are having issues with enabling XMP on your (Asus Tuf z690-Plus?) motherboard you can try swapping memory banks and see if that clears up the issue.
