750 Nvme PCIe Aic (400gb) on an Asus Maximus Hero 7

[TMenk1]

Hello everyone,

Yesterday i received my long awaited PCIe SSD card, and after 8 hours of struggling with it i managed to install windows 7 on it and boot from it.

Disclaimer: My CPU is an Intel 4790k (Not overclocked since i installed my drive, but my memory uses an XMP profile) and my GPUs are 780ti from gigabyte(×2). Since i only have 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes for my CPU to utilize i connected my SSD to PCIe 2.0 ×4 instead of 3.0 ×2 so my SLI setup will continue to work (my drive performance is now capped at 1.7 GBPS sequential read and 1.2 GBPS sequential write and i made peace with that for now).

My motherboard is updated to the latest bios and configured to boot UEFI first on the CMS settings and FastBoot is disabled.

After several installations using the drivers on the disk provided with the product that failed i downloaded the drivers from the Intel support website. The installation succeeded, but when trying to boot Windows failed and the reason was a corrupted or missibg driver (IaNVME.sys and IaNVMef.sys).

The only way i got windows to boot was to load the newest drivers in the installation x64 bit then x32 bit (in that specific order - odd?).

My first problem: windows does not boot smoothly, the speed is somewhere close to Sata SSD boot speed but slower and after the post screen i see a flickering underscore (much like command line) for two-four seconds before the windows logo appears..

Second problem: a whole day of tinkering later, windows is fully updated and works fine (except the boot issues), but i noticed the drivers for the NVMe drives are provided by windows and not Intel. By this point after trying to install for so long and finally reaching something stable I'm afraid to overwrite the existing drivers and cause windows to fail to boot again..

Thanks in advance for anyone trying to shed light on the matter!

[idata]

To be clear: You are successfully booting the SSD 750 in 32bit?

64bit is supposed to be a requirement to support the uEFI mode needed for NVMe boot.

[TMenk1]

No, sorry if i wasn't clear on that.

The drivers for the NVMe were loaded in that weird order (x64 and then x32) during the windows 7 installation but the version installed was x64 windows 7.