Unless you have a problem with bounding boxes or Z-fighting, (which I doubt)… this might be a driver problem… try updating it. If that does not help, simply post some code.
So everything else in the code is the same - except in one case you loaded the model to the scene and in the other a simple box was created? Or were there any other differences in your code?
With something like this, I would say is a missing call to updateRenderState or some of its siblings… make extra sure you update everything after adding all objects to the scene… What the heck, for testing purposes, I would call every possible update* in the main thread