I suppose it could come down to a flaky NVMe stick/Controller, but I have no way to diagnose that without spending money on another 970 and I'm hesitant to be stuck with 2 of them if it doesn't work out.
That's strange. Can you try switching the highpoint to a different PCIe slot ie. 1 or 3? How about trying to install highpoint's macos drivers with the RX 580 installed to see if there is any difference?