PC Drivers & Software

[cebesius]

I've done two nearly identical PC builds recently, and both of them are exhibiting the same symptoms.

Symptom: After an indeterminate period of time, seemingly not related to level of usage or idle, the USB ports crash, and attached devices stop working. Attached devices appear to lose power when this occurs. Keyboard/mouse power LEDs turn off, etc. This seems to occur at least once with every 4 hours of usage, but sometimes more or less frequently. Disconnecting and reconnecting the USB devices to the same or different USB ports does not return them to function, and they appear to remain without power.

Workaround: After powering off or rebooting the PC, USB devices start working again

Motherboard: ASUS PRIME X670E-Pro WiFi

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X

RAM: 32GB Corsair Vengeance DDR5-6000 (2x16GB)

Both systems have been flashed to motherboard BIOS version 0821 dated 2022/11/25, latest at time of writing. Both systems have Windows 11 with all system updates installed. Both systems have AMD chipset driver version 4.11.15.342 dated 11/21/2022, latest at time of writing.

One of these PCs has an AMD Radeon 7900 XTX and the other has an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080, both are on the respective latest drivers.

As an additional troubleshooting step, I've booted a Manjaro Linux live environment on both of them, and both systems were used for several hours without repeating the problem. In my opinion, this suggests the problem might be caused by a system software or driver bug.

Has anyone else seen similar? Any suggestions?

[elstaci]

In the past AMD 400 & 500 Series Motherboards did have a USB intermittent issue but was resolved both by AMD and Motherboard Manufacturers with new BIOS versions that fixed the issue generally.

Download these two USB Diagnostic apps to see what is showing when you have a device connected to your USB port:

USB TREEVIEWER: https://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbtreeview_e.html

USB Viewer (Windows SDK Utility): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/usbview?redirectedfrom=MSDN

Both links has other USB Diagnostic utilities you might want to try and then contact Asus Support with the information you saw using those USB Diagnostic apps.

NOTE: In Windows Power Plan disable USB settings and see if that helps any. Possibly you have a defective Motherboard:

[cebesius]

With more time observing the behavior of the system, I think I mischaracterized the problem somewhat in my original post.

When booting Windows 11, it seems like there's a random chance that the USB root will crash within about a minute after Windows finishes booting. Sometimes the problem repeats consecutively after power cycling. Other times, after one power cycle, the problem won't occur on the next boot, and the system will run stable for hours on end, but sometimes it will drop out randomly later on. It seems that with time since boot, the likelihood of the problem repeating lessens.

The exact same symptom still occurs on both PCs I mentioned in the original post.

Under Manjaro Linux, the same issue still has not repeated, and I still think this suggests this is a software problem, rather than a symptom of a hardware defect.

Thanks for the suggestion about adjusting the USB power policy, elstaci. Unfortunately it did not improve the issue.

I'm going to reach out to Asus support next.

[cebesius]

Asus support suggested I follow a couple of steps:

1 - Update BIOS to version 1222, released 2023/02/24
2 - Set BIOS setting Advanced -> USB Configuration -> XHCI Handoff -> Disable

After I updated the BIOS alone, I booted the system to Windows 11, and the problem repeated immediately. So this alone does not solve it.

After I disabled the USB XHCI Handoff in the BIOS, I booted Windows 11 5 times back to back, and the issue did not repeat. This might be solved.

I also just repeated the setting onto the second PC, and I'll observe and report back if the issue continues.

[elstaci]

Thanks for the update and Asus reply back.

So it seems Asus believes it is a BIOS issue at this time.