>>106647171
>>106646942

Thing is I already RMA'd the CPU once. This was before I was messing with the U.2 to M.2 drives. Don't know what happened, didn't even have PBO or anything and it just died one day. Still using the same RAM and mobo that I had with the dead 7950x3d.

In my diagram you can see how I have things. HOWEVER it should be noted that the ACPI error and unbootable to windows is not EXCLUSIVE to when I use the U.2 to M.2 drive. Even if I put a spare M.2 drive in the slot labeled "SKIP" it results in the same issues.

I also found an interesting tidbit from the MB manual itself "* The PCIEX2 slot shares bandwidth with the SATA3 4/5 connectors. The SATA3 4/5
connectors will become unavailable when a device is installed in the PCIEX2 slot." however the most I have ever occupied would be 3 of the SATA slots for 3 HDDs which is below the amount indicated in the manual. The behavior persisted regardless of how many drives I had connected. Last night I had only 1 HDD connected, the SN850X and the Optane boot drive and it still resulted in issues. Today after moving the drives around I have no issues and can restart fine. I even reconnected my other two HDDS. It really is strange behavior that is hard to simply blame on a connector. It seems the slot itself is bad. I tried messing with bifurcation to 4x4x4x4 (which shouldn't change anything) and manually setting all the PCIE slots to 3x and it still resulted in the issues if any drive was plugged into a slot labeled skip. All is working today, but it really confuses me.