Asus Z170 AR - Bios Laggy/Freezes & Other Issues

[TWG1572]

Friday I got a wild hair and decided to take a trip to check out Microcenter. I'd been contemplating an upgrade, and since I'd never been there I decided to take a little road trip and see what the hype was all about. I ended joining team blue and walking out the door with their i5-6600K / Asus Z170 AR motherboard combo. I always had great luck with Asus on my AM3+ motherboards, so decided to stick with it on the Intel side.

I've noticed that the BIOS can be really laggy when selecting options, and sometimes it actually freezes. When that happens, I have to restart. That never happened on my M5A97 R2.0. I do have the BIOS updated to the latest version - 1302. I'd considered reflashing it to see if it would help my issues, but hadn't done it yet. I also see there have been several "stability" BIOS updates coming out over the last few months, and read some comments on it, so wonder if this is just teething issues with a newer product.

I've also noticed that when I make changes in the BIOS, it can take a while to save them. And sometimes, the next startup can be really slow as well. Not sure if that's related or not. Waking up from sleep is also really slow, but that may be a Windows thing.

I have reset the BIOS to run at defaults, nothing is OC'ed. XMP is not enabled. Here are my system specs:

CPU: i5-6600K
MB: Asus Z170 AR
RAM: Corsair Vengeance Series 8GB DDR4-3000 C15 (2 4mb sticks)
GPU: Asus R9 270x
PSU: EVGA Supernova P2 1000w

My bar of reference is my M5A97, which was rock solid. Maybe my expectations are too high. I dunno. I'd just appreciate any thoughts on next steps.

 

[LTC8K6]

Well, that's obviously not normal behavior.

I don't know what would cause it, though.

 

[Ketchup]

Does it show good stability in the OS (under idle and load conditions). Aside from the board I am wondering if the power supply could be causing some issues.

Out of curiosity, do you get the same behavior if you take out your video card and run it off onboard graphics?

One test you could try is disabling onboard devices that you aren't using (assuming it stays active long enough).

 

[Burpo]

First thing I would do is enable XMP..

 

[TWG1572]

Does it show good stability in the OS (under idle and load conditions). Aside from the board I am wondering if the power supply could be causing some issues.

Out of curiosity, do you get the same behavior if you take out your video card and run it off onboard graphics?

One test you could try is disabling onboard devices that you aren't using (assuming it stays active long enough).

Stability wise, I'm not getting crashes. But I'm not happy with performance of Win 10 on this computer, relative to what I saw on my old one with the FX6300/M5A97 R2.0. It feels like it hangs and the blue circle spins more frequently than it should. Win 10 is working, it's just not as quick/snappy feeling as what I'm used to. Which is frustrating, given where I was hardware wise vs. where I am now.

I did a clean install of Win 10 on my SSD boot drive. I reconnected the boot drive and figured I'd see if it could boot to Windows. It did, so I connected my Win 10 installation USB and selected the clean install option and let it do its thing. In hindsight, I probably should have formatted the SSD drive and then booted to the USB drive with Windows on it and installed it that way. No second guessing how "clean" the install was then.

I did run p95 v27.9 for an hour and a half with no issues and good temps. I know that's not the end all be all, but I took it to be an encouraging sign.

The rest of the hardware is from my old computer. The PSU is a couple weeks old (Black Friday deal. It's massive overkill, but...) The old computer was running fine with the hardware, but you never know.

I've not tried pulling the GPU. I'll do that tonight and see what happens.

First thing I would do is enable XMP..

I didn't mention it in my OP, but I was running XMP to begin with. I turned it off, because the general guidance seemed to be to set everything to base/defaults.

One area I realized I was lazy in was around running Memtest. I usually do that, and didn't when I built this one. I'll run it tonight, just in case there is something it might catch.

 

[TWG1572]

I just have a minor update, it was Christmas cookie baking time with the family last night so I had limited time to get away and work on the computer. But I did a few things...

1) I decided to go back to default and reflash the BIOS on the theory that maybe there was something a little corrupt in there that was causing issues. When the computer re-booted after flashing, it went to the F1 error screen. The error I'm getting is ""Please enter setup to recover bios setting. When raid configuration was built, ensure to set sata configuration to raid mode." I don't have hardware RAID, and when I hit F1 the bios is showing as updated. So, I'm not sure if this is an issue or not. I'll say I Googled the message and there is pretty much nothing out there about it.

I tried re-flashing both through the BIOS and AISuite and the error happens every time. I wonder if I should pull all the SATA drive connections and try again. That might eliminate one piece of the puzzle and potentially get me somewhere.

2) I still have some hanging with the new flashed BIOS. One area is particulary problematic - the Q Fan setup where you optimize the fans. It's 50/50 whether the system hangs and I have to restart when I hit the final apply/OK button after it's run it's tests.

3) XMP is now enabled.

 

[1234qwerty]

I have the same problem i also cant boot the windows on my ssd im sceptical if updating bios will help or not i tried everything from above