I have a x58 rampage 3 black edition and even with the riser card don't you need a UEFI bios to recognize the drive so the system can boot from it?
Did you flash your bios with a UEFI Mod version for your MB? You're actually the first person I've bumped into on the internet that can boot from this drive with such little effort on an x58 MB
When you said you did a clean install of win 10 and you upgraded from 7, did you clone the 950 drive first from the old drive with win 7.
I'm really hoping this is as easy as you point out, because I really need a faster drive.
Honestly, it was probably the easiest fresh OS install I've ever done. Certainly not what I was expecting given the limited information I could find, but I've always run into some kind of issue when installing Windows. This was the first time where everything went smoothly and I didn't have to chase gremlins around.
No custom BIOS was needed. I do have the latest BIOS, but since the board is so old I think the BIOS is like 5 years old. I did a completely clean install - no cloning. As I mentioned in my earlier post the only BIOS setting I messed around with was the "Addon ROM Display Mode" and I'm not even sure if that was necessary.
Samsung's consumer NVME drives (the 950 Pro's) use a controller chip that is compatible with legacy BIOS systems. This means you shouldn't need UEFI to use it as a boot drive. I know there are at least one or two other people on other forums who were successful using the 950 Pro as a boot drive on X58. I haven't read about anyone who wasn't able to get it working, but that might just be due to the small number of people still running an X58 system.