Fatal1ty B450 Windows installation looping

Duplicate post deleted.

When installing windows 10 it is always best to install with only the OS drive installed on the system. Once done then add the storage drive. This is due to the nature of EFI booting, it will often write to the secondary drive and cause EFI issues on the system.

Boot order shouldn't make a difference to the installation, it sounds like your installation medium is not working correctly. Download microsoft's tool and create a new install medium, let us know if that works for you. Rest assured, the issue is very unlikely to be the SATA ports or board, were that true we would be seeing a lot more posts like yours here on the forums. Honestly, I suspect the issue is having both drives connected during installation. Make sure your boot options are set to EFI not GPT and try the install again without the mechanical drive connected.

I have the same board and same drive and it runs fine, and installation was fine.

Sounds like you haven't done one of these systems in a number of years. The option to "press a key....." isn't native in most modern UEFI based systems.

The problems you cite have zero to do with it being an AMD system, as they all use the same bootstrapping technique and Windows doesn't care what the CPU is for the most part.

With the NVMe based boot drives, as Xaltar pointed out, its best to build the system up initially with just that drive installed on board.   Reset CMOS, and then try again with just the 970 EVO installed. Again, nothing to do with AMD, but just a characteristic of mixing AHCI (SATA Disk software layer) and NVMe (PCIe SSD software layer) still isn't perfect, although its getting there.   Blame some of this on still developing UEFI firmware as well.

The hardware is perfectly fine, although parts could be defective.

A clean install, with minimal components, almost always works

C'n'Q won't work when OC-ing? Well, that sounds like your fuel economy goes down at full throttle...

No offense but fisrt, I suggest you read some info on OC-ing Ryzen. The Stilt's thread at Anand's is a good start. One can't expect to go nuclear on all knobs and dials, and evertything to be magically fine.

If you need higher dynamics with the clocks, and some extra juice on-the-go, you can do that too. Just check the existing threads here or open another one.

Oh, bwoy! It sure starts to smell like a fanboy war. Flame on! /Johnny, FF/

The only thing wrong with your system is your attitude towards it.

In contrast to you, I've been building mostly AMD systems ever since their K6 days. I stll do to this day, because I know how to tame the beast.

Now, on the tech side. C'n'Q will 'work' even if you try and OC, but it will only make the system unstable. If you want high clocks during load AND low clocks during idle, then check P-states OC out.

Every clock/state tech must be disabled prior to manual OC. I've even done this on (a few) intel builds. C'n'Q makes no exception.

Oddly enough, some mfrs. really choose not to include P-states OC in ther BIOS. Knowing ASRock it would not surprise me if they decided to skip this for your board model.

BTW, what you're trying to achieve is also possible with XFR2 & PBO on Ryzen 2. These 2 basically auto 'OC' your CPU when certain conditions are met. 1st gen Ryzens only support XFR, though.