Hello all,
While I had to also do a little digging to find out if this was a possibility, I wanted to report back after a couple weeks once I got my drive in that I have successfully been able to use the Intel 750 PCIe x4 NVMe SSD 1.2 TB model on my EVGA X79 Dark board. I was intrigued by the product's performance but according to all information by Intel, it appeared that the SSD would only work on the Z97 and X99 chipsets with older architectures such as X79 being literally hit-or-miss.
While I had no manual to guide me and had to suffer through a lot of failed boot device attempts, I finally found the proper settings for anyone else who is or may be in my situation in the future.
I had originally tried the lowest tiny x4 slot on the X79 Dark and while the drive was recognized, I originally thought it in error since I did not see it detected on the motherboard at all. I instead continued my haphazard troubleshooting by moving the SSD to the bottom x16 full length slot.
Originally I was also wary about swapping out BIOSes since my board's stock one had been superb for maintaining a rock solid OC of 4.2 Ghz on my 4930K, but I was hearing that by updating the BIOS, better compatibility for NVMe microcode and other factors were implemented. I flashed the original BIOS up to what I figured was the latest I could find (2.12) and continued.
It turned out that the other thing needed since I did not have a successful Windows 10 x64 Pro ISO was to load Intel NVMe's device driver file on a CD or USB drive since the only disc I could find was my old Windows 7 x64 Pro, and the Intel drive is completely invisible to that setup installer natively unless you "Have Driver / find the file location" while installing the OS.
The key aspect to getting the PCIe drive working on the Dark however, was going into the advanced menus and changing nearly all settings to UEFI instead of ACHI. But changing the wrong ones such as for video would of course not let the video card be detected in legacy mode and would cause a system freeze, and disabling the CSM module completely would turn off other drives I had in the system.
The CSM settings that worked for me...
Keep in mind I adjusted my voltage slightly more for a stable 4.30 OC now and have used Automatic XMP settings for 64 GB of 1866 Mhz RAM so if one is wondering if it can work with that much RAM installed, that presented no issue. I think I had done some more RAM adjusting after this so forgive the older BIOS screenshot. But the biggest thing is having Boot Options and storage set to UEFI, along with other PCI devices.
Since this board is technically unsupported and no manual or Intel ark guide could guide me, it was basically fiddle around until I find the settings that worked. Not the best method, but one that did work in the end after a few hours.
Another issue was that I had left all my optical drives, along with two SSDs and two HDDs all plugged in during the Windows 7 boot, forcing the PCIe SSD to something high like device / channel #7. Even after loading the Intel driver, I would still see non-bypassable warnings that I could *not* install Windows to that drive even if I deleted and remade partitions. Unplugging all drives except one optical drive and my primary original OS SSD reduced the drive count to where the Intel drive did not complain.
Rebooting back into Windows 7 setup with only those two drives (and no USB external HDDs connected) allowed the OS install forward without a hitch. I reconnected my MS account, patched Windows 7, immediately upgraded to Windows 10, and manually copied all files back from my original OS SSD while of course going through the actual install routines. Some programs of course did not need a formal reinstall, whereas the vast majority of others did. I only did this because as was mentioned, Intel's drive has NVMe architecture more suited for SSDs instead of having disk structures meant for HDDs propagating into current SSDs and I did not want to clone that offset into the new SSD. The good news after moving my profile onto the SSD, nearly all reinstalls saw my intact settings and I didn't really have to reconfigure too many programs. Whole process took about a day. Woo.
As far as I can tell, it's working great and I can certainly say that if you can afford the drive, the difference in general snappiness compared to even an SSD is noticeable. Maybe not in CPU-bound work or games, but I am working on a comparison video for reference. It may not be HDD > SSD difference, but it's still very substantial! Seems like it's working great in this system and I had no issues plugging all my other drives back in afterwards and now having this drive as my primary SSD. It *is* bootable on EVGA X79 ;)
