About to throw this Asus Z170 Pro Gaming out of the window

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Elledan

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - April 2010
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I recently built a new Intel i7 6700k system using an Asus Z170 Pro Gaming after reading great reviews about it on [H] and elsewhere. My experience so far has been practically negative, however.

First the specs of the new system:

- Intel i7 6700K
- Asus Z170 Pro Gaming
- 32 GB (4 x 8 GB) Kingston HyperX 2666 MHz DDR4
- Seasonic P-660 PSU
- MSI GTX 980 Ti Sea Hawk
- Toshiba 5 TB HDD
- Samsung 1 TB HDD
- 3x Dell U2515H LCDs
- Windows 7 x64 SP1

The first problems started with the system not booting, even in a minimal configuration. Only with half of the RAM removed (leaving two sticks in the first two slots) would the system boot. After that I could shut down the system, reinsert the RAM and boot successfully with all RAM slots populated. I have since updated the BIOS to the latest (1102) update, which hopefully resolves this issue (untested.

Another issue was with the onboard audio (SupremeFX) having so much background noise and interference to be practically unusable. I also got heavy stuttering on any audio after leaving the system on for a while. To solve this I got an external USB DAC (Asus Xonar U5. Yes, irony).

With the USB DAC installed I did however still have the same stuttering issues, even while the background noise was practically gone. After some research with tools like DPC Latency Checker and LatencyMon I tracked this down to the Intel USB 3.0 driver misbehaving and locking up the CPU for milliseconds (!) at a time after leaving the system on for half a day or longer.

While trying to debug this DPC latency issue with the Intel USB 3.0 driver I had no luck whatsoever in fixing anything, with the impossibility of playing back audio eventually forcing me to restart the system so that I could at least kind of use the system for a few hours the way I'm supposed to.

All the drivers are updated to the latest version, and Windows is fully patched up as well (minus Win10-related viruses).

This whole issue is bringing back the nightmare that was my last Asus board (KT-888-based) and my vow to never use Asus mainboards again after that experience. Seems I should have listened to myself.

Unless anyone has an idea here, I'll likely be ordering a replacement mainboard soon and returning this POS Asus... mainboard.

Thanks for listening :)
 
Try the ASMedia USB 3 ports, but from my experience, they are going to be pretty much junk on absolutely any board you get. The only way to maybe get them to work is if you are able to find drivers that are newer than the ones they have on the motherboard mfg site. Some of the ASMedia chips also have firmware updates.

It has been like this since the x58 days.

The Intel ports should just work though. But from what you are saying, they are not. Are they sharing an IRQ with something else?
 
The Intel USB ports are not sharing an IRQ with anything as far as I can tell (how to verify?).

The Asmedia USB 3.1 ports are working like a charm so far, and I have considered just piling everything on that single USB-A port and leaving the Intel USB eXtended Host Controller device uninstalled.

What I am seeing with LatencyMon and other tools is that iusb3xhc.sys (Intel USB 3 driver) keeps blocking the CPU longer and longer with DPC calls, until other drivers are being starved of CPU cycles. This take a few hours to become serious enough that the stuttering begins on audio playback, but it happens every time.
 
Elledan said:
The Intel USB ports are not sharing an IRQ with anything as far as I can tell (how to verify?).

The Asmedia USB 3.1 ports are working like a charm so far, and I have considered just piling everything on that single USB-A port and leaving the Intel USB eXtended Host Controller device uninstalled.

What I am seeing with LatencyMon and other tools is that iusb3xhc.sys (Intel USB 3 driver) keeps blocking the CPU longer and longer with DPC calls, until other drivers are being starved of CPU cycles. This take a few hours to become serious enough that the stuttering begins on audio playback, but it happens every time.
Click to expand...

That is very strange. Sounds like a bad driver bug to me. What version of the chipset drivers are you using?
 
If you have AI Suite installed, remove it. The current version polls a bit too aggressively, which can cause DPC latency spikes.
 
cyclone3d said:
That is very strange. Sounds like a bad driver bug to me. What version of the chipset drivers are you using?
Click to expand...
I'm using the latest Intel USB 3 drivers: 4.0.0.36.

Raja@ASUS said:
If you have AI Suite installed, remove it. The current version polls a bit too aggressively, which can cause DPC latency spikes.
Click to expand...

Thank you, I have AI Suite III 1.01.24 installed. I will immediately uninstall it.
 
I uninstalled AI Suite III and all components, then restarted as the uninstaller requested. After restarting, Windows had lost the driver for the Intel USB 3 chipset (?!) and I had reinstall it. Things are working again, for now. I'll see how things work in a few hours from now.
 
I have this board and I haven't had any problems. One reason is that g skill seems to be the only ram that works properly. So that's one issue you have. The second was the crap AI suite that you thankfully removed.
 
mls1995 said:
I have this board and I haven't had any problems. One reason is that g skill seems to be the only ram that works properly. So that's one issue you have. The second was the crap AI suite that you thankfully removed.
Click to expand...

Yeah, my experience with that Asus KT-888 board should have reminded me already to only use the <1% of RAM out there which has been tested & approved/blessed by Asus itself. Chalk that one up to running AMD systems for years which just happily gobbled up whatever cheap RAM you threw at them.

I just checked the DPC latency and it's still at <100 us, even after an hour or two. I hope it stays that way. If it was this AI Suite III software, then I wonder why the hell it's still available for download if it can cause such major issues.
 
Elledan said:
Yeah, my experience with that Asus KT-888 board should have reminded me already to only use the <1% of RAM out there which has been tested & approved/blessed by Asus itself. Chalk that one up to running AMD systems for years which just happily gobbled up whatever cheap RAM you threw at them.

I just checked the DPC latency and it's still at <100 us, even after an hour or two. I hope it stays that way. If it was this AI Suite III software, then I wonder why the hell it's still available for download if it can cause such major issues.
Click to expand...

Actually that isn't the case. I have 2 Asus z170 systems and neither worked with ram on the QVL (1 corsair dominator set and 1 Kingston kit). Both systems now work perfectly using g skill sets that aren't on the QVL. So moving forward, I'm not going to pay any attention to the QVL as clearly that doesn't make any difference. By the way, same ram didn't work with gigabyte either which resulted in any unnecessary mobo RMA.

Among Kingston and Corsair, I've found that only g skill ddr4 ram works properly on z170 with no issues. I have no idea why.
 
Elledan said:
I just checked the DPC latency and it's still at <100 us, even after an hour or two. I hope it stays that way. If it was this AI Suite III software, then I wonder why the hell it's still available for download if it can cause such major issues.
Click to expand...

Every motherboard maker tends to put out shit utilities that screw things up :(
 
mls1995 said:
Actually that isn't the case. I have 2 Asus z170 systems and neither worked with ram on the QVL (1 corsair dominator set and 1 Kingston kit). Both systems now work perfectly using g skill sets that aren't on the QVL. So moving forward, I'm not going to pay any attention to the QVL as clearly that doesn't make any difference. By the way, same ram didn't work with gigabyte either which resulted in any unnecessary mobo RMA.

Among Kingston and Corsair, I've found that only g skill ddr4 ram works properly on z170 with no issues. I have no idea why.
Click to expand...

That's hugely disappointing, to be honest. I'll keep the G Skill RAM thing in mind for my next purchase at any rate :)
 
Raja@ASUS said:
If you have AI Suite installed, remove it. The current version polls a bit too aggressively, which can cause DPC latency spikes.
Click to expand...

After a couple of hours since I uninstalled AI Suite III and restarted, I can confirm that this software was the cause of the massive DPC latency, and not the Intel USB driver as I had assumed based on xperf profiling. Thanks for the assist, Raja! :)

---

I am still eyeing some ISR latency with the DirectX graphics kernel and LatencyMon didn't care for the 2 ms latency for interrupt to process latency, but that is userspace level, I believe. There was a bit of audio drop-out/popping earlier, but that seems to be virtually gone now and the DPC monitoring at least looks normal, with latency <1,000 us.
 
Raja@ASUS said:
Yep, even operating systems need updates and service packs.
Click to expand...

I definitely appreciate your point. I think the best approach is for people to get their systems up and running before installing any utilities. This applies to motherboard, GPU, audio (like X-Fi MB3), and SSD apps provided by the manufacturers. This reduces the number of potential issues and makes for easier troubleshooting. While neat, I've encountered more issues than solutions from motherboard utilities being used to tweak setting / install BIOS updates from Windows :eek:
 
Nice to see that Asus hasn't fixed the memory boot issue since z68 :) On my z97 couldn't boot up my old memory, only after I used only one stick, it started. So now, when I was switching to 2133mhz kit (luck of finally winning something in Christmas giveaways :)) I thought I was prepared - had newest bios and such, but it still didn't boot with two sticks. Guess it's the issue with that memory system that supposedly should make no issues with sticking new ram and should set the sticks parameters to acceptable values, but it makes problems with XMP profiles.
 
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