Video Performance Problems after Installing 960 Pro??

[jmarsch]

So this is really weird:

I just installed a Samsung 960 Pro NVMe drive. I was pretty excited about it, but now that it is installed, my video performance has completely tanked!

Suddenly, my machine can barely run Borderlands!

It's pretty decent hardware:
core i7 6700k
nVidia 1070
16GB RAM
Samsung 960 Pro
Gigabyte Gaming 7 mobo (tried installing latest firmware update)
Windows 10 pro/64-bit

There doesn't appear to be any abnormal CPU or memory utilization. I'm not sure where else to look.

This thing ran like a dream until a couple of hours ago, when I migrated to the NVMe drive. Has anyone else installed one of these and run into problems?

 

[VirtualLarry]

So, a few things.

You mentioned a firmware update for your mobo. Did you install F20 BIOS, at the same time you installed the SSD? There have been reports of issues with that BIOS, even bricking boards. Check out a few threads in the motherboards section for more info.

You mentioned that you "migrated" to the NVMe SSD. How did you do that? Fresh install, or cloning?

Have you checked the PCI-E lane allocation on your mobo? Maybe your video card shifted down to x8, when you installed the PCI-E SSD.

 

[jmarsch]

Hi VirtualLarry

You mentioned a couple of interesting things
1. I did install the F20 BIOS (I hadn't heard about the problems). I only did it after I encountered the video problems

2. I could _swear_ that when I initially set this machine up (just in November), that there were settings in the BIOS to configure the SATA lanes for my video card (I saw them, but left them alone, because I only have one card). But for the life of me, I can't find them now. Did I imagine that? I can't see a way to tell whether my card is in x8 or x16 mode. Any suggestions?

3. On the migration, here's what I did:
My original setup had 1 ssd and 2 hdds:
(ssd for O/S and software, 1 HDD for User data ("my documents", etc mapped to here), and 1 4TB HDD for disk image backups (I use acronis)

My goal was to use the 960 Pro as my O/S / software drive, to replace my User Data HDD with the SSD that I had been using as my boot drive, and to keep my 4TB backup drive.

So here were my steps:
1. Installed the Samsung drive (note, I don't know whether this matters, but I initially installed the Pro to the wrong M.2 slot, thus shutting down a bunch of my SATA connections. I corrected this before proceding to step 2)
2. Installed the Samsung NVMe driver
3. I used Samsung's Data Migration tool to copy my old ssd to the samsung (I had considered just restoring an Acronis backup, but I wanted fewer variables in case I needed to get support from Samsung)
4. After the migration, I noted that the Data Migration tool had cloned the disk signature from my old ssd to the samsung, and put my old ssd offline (I guess it assumes you are not keeping the old drive)
5. Used DiskPart to assign a new signature to my old ssd.
7. Removed my old hdd
8. Enabled Windows 8/10 mode in my Bios, and set teh SATA mode from "Legacy" to UEFI (seemed to be required to get a successful boot out of the samsung
9. Booted, and restored a backup of my User Data volume (that I had taken before I began) to my old SSD so that it could be my user data drive.

10. After a little poking around, I wanted to see how fast some of my games loaded, so I fired up the Borderlands Prequel.
11. I had previously configured it with all the settings maxed (didn't make the 1070 break a sweat before)
12. Noticed that the game is now very choppy
13. Rebooted (no joy)
14. Shut down, cut power, re-powered, retried (no joy)
15. Updated to latest firmware on my motherboard (I guess I'm lucky it didn't brick)

As an aside (and I don't know whether this is related), I'm also not getting the rated throughput out of my drive. according to Magician, I'm getting 2,226 MB/s read, and 1,802 Write, which is pretty close to the specs for the 950 Pro.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Ok, so you claim that you put the M.2 PCI-E SSD into the "wrong" M.2 socket, initially, because that shut off SATA ports on you.

If you board has multiple M.2 sockets, then the can be connected either to the PCH / Southbridge PCI-E lanes, or the CPU's direct PCI-E lanes.

If one socket interfered with the SATA ports, then that one was wired to the PCH, and the other one, is likely to be wired to the CPU, which appears to be the one that you are using. That one will cause your video card's PCI-E connection to halve, from x16 to x8, or worse.

You can run GPU-Z, and it should be able to tell you the video card's PCI-E bus width.

 

[deustroop]

As an aside , Samsung Magician v5 will display that lane information as well under the "interface " title.
On the issue that the video may be degraded by the lane selection the motherboard makes when operating the NVME device, I don't see that an x8 lane would cause any degradation. As I read the PCIE 3 spec, a x8 slot will provide 7.8 GBps transfer rate in one direction. The GTX 1070 device has a memory speed of 8 Gbps so there will be lots of room at x8; even x4 @ 3.9 GBps should not degrade the video performance. I'm sure I have seen performance results to this effect.

We have not heard back from OP on your questions. I am curious to ask about the bios change he made. If he was operating Windows 10 in legacy mode, would that not mean the disk was partitioned with MBR ? I understand that if you run windows using a UEFI bios on an MBR partition there will be issues.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, even if his video card is now operating in PCI-E 3.0 x8 mode, according to some charts I saw posted from TechPowerUp, in the VC&G forum, there's really not much performance degradation (1-3%, maybe?).

Edit: See second page in this thread:
https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...rclocking-in-2016-best-budget-oc-kit.2492304/

So, while that may be happening, that may not explain everything.

I personally suspect some software issues, maybe revolving around the NVMe driver?

 

[mnewsham]

I have an issue getting the Samsung NVMe driver to load in windows 10, at least with my 950 pro, the stock windows driver gives nearly the same performance though so I haven't bothered to chase the issue down to figure out what it really is.

It seems to think the samsung driver is unsigned and wont load it.

 

[deustroop]

I think Dev Mgr shows a Windows driver for the disk drive but the driver is loaded when Samsung shows in the Storage Controllers category.

I can see no difference in perf between drivers.

Can't you by-pass the "unsigned" message ?

 

[mnewsham]

Can't you by-pass the "unsigned" message ?

It requires loading into windows, selecting one of the special restart options, then selecting another option which takes you to another selection screen where you press F10 to allow unsigned drivers to be loaded at boot, then it restarts and boots up windows and allows it.

But the next time I restart I have to do it all over again, or I just click OK when it says it didn't load the driver and let it use the windows NVMe driver.

 

[deustroop]

Get the latest driver. The driver I have is signed., ver. 2.0.0.1607

 

[mnewsham]

Get the latest driver. The driver I have is signed., ver. 2.0.0.1607

Same as mine, trust me that was the first thing I did.

And this is on a brand new fresh install of windows 10 as of ~dec 2nd.

 

[deustroop]

Same as mine, trust me that was the first thing I did.

And this is on a brand new fresh install of windows 10 as of ~dec 2nd.

Ah, you may want to see this thread

https://www.tenforums.com/software-apps/59899-samsung-magician-need-digitally-signed-driver.html
----------------------------------------------------
Starting with new installations of Windows 10, version 1607, the previously defined driver signing rules will be enforced by the Operating System, and Windows 10, version 1607 will not load any new kernel mode drivers which are not signed by the Dev Portal. OS signing enforcement is only for new OS installations; systems upgraded from an earlier OS to Windows 10, version 1607 will not be affected by this change.

----------------------------------------------
So does my driver work, though not signed, simply because it was installed in my Windows ver 1511 ? However the Properties tab of the Samsung driver listed in Storage Controller says
Digital Signer: Microsoft Windows Hardware Compatibility Publisher.

Looks signed, and if so, and you have the same file, then Bob is not your Uncle.

 

[mnewsham]

Yeah mine is signed by MS and samsung. It shows up under storage controllers in device manager, but it still pops up every restart telling me it isn't signed.

 

[jmarsch]

@ VirtualLarry:

Sorry, was away for most of the day. Yes, my board has 2 m.2 connectors. According to the manual, using the second one will deactivate several of my SATA ports, and 1 of my PCIe slots.

So, this is weird:
I ran GPUz, and it confirmed that my video card is running at 16x,

I am curious about the UEFI comments in this thread. UEFI is new to me, and the install of windows that I had on my old ssd was mbr, not gpt. I wonder if that is really the source of my problems.

I'm going to try the following procedure to see if it clears some things up:

1. I'm going to re-seat my video card, just on the off chance that it's something simple.

2. I'm going to restore an image backup to my old SSD, and remove the samsung drive to verify that takes me back to my original performance level.

3. I'm going to try a clean, UEFI install of Windows on the new drive, instead of cloning the drive.

Any suggestions that would allow me to avoid the reinstall?

Wish me luck.

 

[jmarsch]

Been in and out a lot -- family in town this week, but the reinstall seems to have done the trick. I'm not sure precisely what caused it in the first place, but after doing a UEFI install of Windows, and installing the chipset and samsung drivers, my performance seems to be right, and all peripherals are working. I've never been a huge fan of in place upgrades or drive cloning, but I had thought that since I was only replacing the drive that it was a safe option (especially since the build was so new anyway). I suppose that even nowadays, nothing beats a clean install.

 

[deustroop]

I think the kink came about in the mix of UEFI and partition scheme. Nice to see that we can fix things from time to time.