ASUS Z170-AR: I don't want to OC!

[NathanBrazil]

Perhaps I bought too much motherboard for my purposes but the x4 M.2 slot and USB 3.1 were major reasons for building this machine and $99 was an irresistible price, especially when a i5-6500 was only $170 as well. Add to this a Samsung 950 PCIe SSD. But the problems I've been having make me wonder if the board is defective.

Right off the bat, it insisted on trying to overclock on first boot and failed at 15%. There was no obvious switch to turn this off. F5 to Load defaults supposedly does it but if I try to save and exit after doing that the system goes into a black screen coma and requires a forced shutdown to recover. I've left it alone for up to ten minutes in that state and it never came back on its own. This was after updating to the latest firmware.

Eventually, I stumbled on a way to convince it to only OC at 12%, which allowed Win10 to be installed. In windows 10, if allowed to go into hibernation it would never come back from that. Turning off sleep in Windows avoided the issue but was not an optimal solution.

Is the coma after trying to save firmware settings a common issue? Would clearing the CMOS help? I really want to make this work and having to RMA it would be a huge pain at this juncture but I'm at a loss as to how to make this run at factory settings with proper sleep functionality.

 

[=Wendy=]

If its overclocking out of the box, then the TPU switch is most likely in the ON position.

Check the board and make sure the TPU switch is turned OFF.

 

[NathanBrazil]

Really? You'd never get that from the manual. It only speaks of the switch in terms of cooling options. Since I had a ThermalTake Water 3.0 installed, silly me, I thought the II position was the appropriate setting.

I can see a vague suggestion from the wording in the manual. They really need better staff in that department. I'll make the change and see what happens.

Thank you.

 

[NathanBrazil]

Well, that was it. I cannot believe how much time I spent trying to solve it by myself. I've been building systems for over twenty years and the issues usually became clear with a bit of analysis. But this one just wasn't coming to me no matter how much I reread the docs.