Intel Management Engine Interface and Z170 in AHCI Storage Mode

[BonzaiDuck]

I have been taking my time to build this system:

i7-6700K [binned Silicon Lottery CLU-Relid]
ASUS Sabertooth Z170 S motherboard
Gigabyte GTX 1070 OC Mini graphics
G.SKILL TridentZ DDR4-3200 XMP 14-14-14
ADATA SP550 480GB SSD boot drive
Seagate Barracuda 2TB 128MB-cache HDD
[for the record: Cooler -- TR LG Macho]

I've got stellar clocks for 4.5 and 4.6, with a stable clock for 4.7 -- a "working" profile. I haven't OC'd the graphics card yet, but it has built-in OC profiles revealed by the Gigabyte software. I am cautious about the behavior of this software, since MSI Afterburner does better monitoring with a better interface. Except for an experimental "troubleshooting" increase in GPU temperature threshold by +5C, nothing has been changed.

Latest drivers are the chipset SW, latest revision that I know of.
NVidia drivers released October 27 (yesterday)
Originally -- the Native MS ACHI driver [I'll explain my replacement of this with the Intel ISRT software and drivers]
The Realtek Audio driver downloaded from the ASUS website (as are all the others except for G-byte software and NVidia drivers).

SYMPTOM: When playing the stock-car racing simulator GRID2 (the only game installed on the system thus far), display/action AND sound freezes momentarily -- perhaps a second or two -- and then recovers. On the levity side, this caused a lot of collisions.

The event logs are all blue except for known, familiar benign red and yellow bangs. The system is stable. The VCORE of ~1.30V Turbo is more than enough than the minimum which is < 1.282V with LLC=5.

The system will run 3DMark, Unigine Valley and Heaven, FurMark, AIDA64 graphics stress test -- nothing is out of order, and the card ramps up as it's supposed to do somewhere above 1,800Mhz core speed.

My web-search of the problem turns it up as a common phenomenon posted on a few different forum sites. One person who experienced the problem took action to find most recent drivers, and solved it by getting most recent driver releases to install for everything I'd mentioned here.

In process of doing that, I reluctantly relinquished my reliance on the native MS AHCI drivers. Intel STILL fails to offer something like a "Safely Remove" icon for hot-swap or ODD, or I haven't discovered yet how to do it. But I installed the Intel SATA drivers and ISRT software.

Suddenly, and I say this as a tentative observation, the freezing in GRID2 seems to have disappeared. We cannot be sure yet that this is settled, but it is not a problem of failing hardware. Confirmation of this is so far just a few passes at different track scenarios in GRID2.



SO MY QUESTION: In the process of reviewing Intel IRST, I took another look at the Intel Management Engine Interface (driver? software?), and tried to install it. It throws an error, but the message does not necessarily suggest something wrong, and mentions BIOS settings. The only BIOS settings I can think of are under PCH Storage, or it would be some post-time switch for an option ROM. Nothing in the BIOS about "Management Engine Interface." The usual features reveal themselves if you change storage mode to RAID, but no mention of MEI.

DO I NEED MEI? Is MEI dependent on storage mode (AHCI vs RAID)? Have I missed something? I seem to recall from some years back that MEI seemed to present RAID configurations for the Intel controller to the user in a Windows session.

Any thoughts would help me move on with my day.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

CONFIRMED: This is all about software and drivers, or just software. I installed Assetto Corsa racing simulator, and it doesn't miss a lick. This is a problem with GRID2. It may not even be there anymore -- I can only wait and see.

But . . . . DO I NEED MEI? [and my other questions.]

 

[VirtualLarry]

I don't install the IME drivers, there seems to be no point in doing so, unless you are a business, and using AMT technology to spy on your users.

As for RST, I've only recently installed them on my Skylake Z170 Pro4S rig, with a BCLK OCed G4400 (135 BLCK), and I got a blue-screen the other day, on a relatively fresh (few days old) install of Win10 Home 1607.

At least, I think that the problem is RST, but I haven't done the necessary debugging to confirm.

What I don't understand is, I swapped from a Samsung SM951 AHCI M.2 PCI-E SSD, to an Intel 600p PCI-E NVMe SSD, and in both cases, RST didn't show the M.2 / PCI-E SSD, much less load drivers for it.

I had thought that RST supported controlling M.2 PCI-E SSDs, in that it was required to RAID-0 a pair of M.2 PCI-E SSDs, on motherboards so equipped with two slots for M.2 SSDs.

Is this not so?

Has anyone else installed Intel RST, to control their M.2 PCI-E SSDs, and seen any example that it actually interfaces with M.2 SSDs at all? On an ASRock Z170 Pro4S, or any other Z170 board?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I don't install the IME drivers, there seems to be no point in doing so, unless you are a business, and using AMT technology to spy on your users.

As for RST, I've only recently installed them on my Skylake Z170 Pro4S rig, with a BCLK OCed G4400 (135 BLCK), and I got a blue-screen the other day, on a relatively fresh (few days old) install of Win10 Home 1607.

At least, I think that the problem is RST, but I haven't done the necessary debugging to confirm.

What I don't understand is, I swapped from a Samsung SM951 AHCI M.2 PCI-E SSD, to an Intel 600p PCI-E NVMe SSD, and in both cases, RST didn't show the M.2 / PCI-E SSD, much less load drivers for it.

I had thought that RST supported controlling M.2 PCI-E SSDs, in that it was required to RAID-0 a pair of M.2 PCI-E SSDs, on motherboards so equipped with two slots for M.2 SSDs.

Is this not so?

Has anyone else installed Intel RST, to control their M.2 PCI-E SSDs, and seen any example that it actually interfaces with M.2 SSDs at all? On an ASRock Z170 Pro4S, or any other Z170 board?

I've only looked into it, to avoid the tribulations you describe.

If it's Windows 10, there should be no problem. If it's Windows 7, then two patches from MS need to be installed (actually one, with the other to correct the first patch). These provide Win 7 with native NVMe drivers.

How this plays out with M.2 configuration and the Intel drivers, I can't say. But that's the objective: to get M.2 to perform as NVMe with NVMe performance.

Meanwhile, it's sort of stupid -- I discovered that once you insert a CD/DVD into the optical drive, there is a "safe removal" icon or you can choose to eject the disc in Windows. With the HDDs, IRST does the same thing. so that's not a problem.

Apparently the use of MSACHI native driver wasn't the cause of my problem. The problem is the stupid game GRID2. I may try and download again to reinstall. So I'm looking at problems not likely related to hardware, OS or drivers, unless it's the interaction of drivers with the game.