Windows 8 enabled a bunch of hardware features that windows 7 supported but were turned off by default. Lots of systems with various hardware did fine until they went to windows 8 and the features were enabled.
I have hit issues like you describe, in my case they were caused by firmware.
-I updated all the drivers I could find, it did not fix the problem
-I updated the BIOS to the current version, it did not fix the problem
-I updated the firmware on my SSD and my problems went away.