New B350F Board User. Couple of Questions.

[DerVol]

I recently assembled a computer from some used and some new components.

Asus Rog Strix B350-F Gaming Motherboard (Used)
Ryzen 5 3600 CPU (New)
16GB Corsair Vengeance Ram (New)
GTX 980ti Video Card (Used)
WD Black NVME M.2 Hard Drive (Used)
Seasonic Plus Gold 550 Watt Power Supply (Used)
Cougar Panzer Fortress Case (Used)

Question 1: I was able to clone Windows 10 onto the M.2 drive. The person who had the motherboard before me was running Windows 10 on an old mechanical hard drive. After resetting Windows 10 and setting it back up, I cloned it onto the M.2 drive using Acronis. The M.2 drive did not appear as boot option until I disconnected all of the other hard drives from the motherboard. Once I did that, it booted right up from the M.2 drive. Unfortunately, I'm not getting true NVME speeds. I'm only getting SATA speeds. I saw a post from a guy named Calvin in one of the ROG forums who suggested a clean install of Windows 10 is necessary. He provided instructions (see below). You basically create a bootable UEFI flash drive using a program called RUFUS. I'm familiar with RUFUS. Calvin's instructions seem pretty straight-forward. The only thing I'm unsure about in his instructions is how to clear the secure boot keys. I've never done that. My question, though, is this... WD doesn't have a driver on their website for the WD Black M.2 NVME hard drive. In my office computer, I use a Samsung Evo 970. Samsung does have a downloadable driver. With the WD drive, I guess I'm stuck using the Windows driver. Is there an easier way to install that Windows driver to get true NVME speeds than doing a fresh install of Windows 10. I already set up MADVR. That took forever. I was hoping to save some time.

Per Calvin

1- The M.2 drive has to be the only drive installed.

2 - Go into the bios, under the boot tab there is an option for CSM, make sure it is disabled.

3 - Click on secure boot option below and make sure it is set to other OS, not windows UEFI.

4 - Click on key management and clear secure boot keys.

5 - Insert a USB memory stick with a UEFI bootable iso of Windows 10 on it, USB3 is quicker but USB2 works also. A Windows DVD won't work unless you've created your own UEFI Bootable DVD.

6 - Press F10 to save, exit and reboot.

7 - Windows 10 will now start installing to your NVME drive as it has its own NVME driver built in.

8 - When the PC reboots hit F2 to go back into the BIOS, you will see under boot priority that windows boot manager now lists your NVME drive.

9 - Click on secure boot again but now set it to WIndows UEFI mode. (see #3 above)

10 - Click on key management and install default secure boot keys

11 - Press F10 to save and exit and windows will finish the install. Once you have Windows up and running, shutdown the PC and reconnect your other SATA drives.

Question 2
The Cougar Panzer Fortress S Case came with three front LED fans preinstalled. They are made by Cougar and the model # is CF-D12HB-R. I have ordered three more that are identical. I plan to use one in the bottom (intake), one on the back (exhaust), and one at the top (exhaust). I realize it will be fan overkill, but I think it will look cool, and I got a good deal on them. The B350F board only has three chassis fan headers. I ordered three fan splitters. The fans only have 3-pins. I was messing around in bios and saw that you can set the fans to PWM or DC. I realize I will have to set all three of the Chassis fans (actually 6 with the splitters) to DC mode. My question is this, do you think the board will be able to control these fans? I would like to be able to turn them down for watching 4K HDR movies. The guy I bought the case from had the three front fans and an old, loud exhaust fan all connected straight to the PSU. They ran 100% all the time. I chucked the old, loud exhaust fan. That made the system a lot quieter, but with six fans I'd like to be able to subdue them a little bit.


Thanks for any advice you can give. I had never built a computer before, so I didn't want to spend a lot of cash. By shopping around and mixing new and used parts, I should only have around $500 total in this system when I'm done.

[RedSector73]

1) You can get HWinfo to see if you set up your boot drive correctly
In system summary toward the bottom right, it should display Operating System UEFI Boot (In green) and Secure Boot (In green)
If you did it correctly. The description given on install of Nvme is correct, only thing I add is that avoid use of SATA 1 as the nvme is assigned this port and may cause a conflict (dramatic speed reductions if used).

2) You can tie DC mode to something important in the system such as VRM or CPU temp and ramp up n down off that for all the fans. Benchmark your system, using 100% on the fan, watching temps with some like AIDA64 and see what get hots then tie the fans to that. Scale them down and rebench to see if this acceptable to you. You can also still use PWM as the splitter typically only have one header which control one/all but found this less reliable, can cause fan(s) to stop at low speed (normally around 40% and lower but will vary on quality / qty). Fan's stopping without full stopping of any power load is bad, as they overheat themselves and this will kill them.

Hope you find this of help.