Asus x370 pro issues?

Justin Rush · July 26, 2019

All,

I'm trying to inquire about any issues that anyone else may be having with the ASUS prime x370 pro board. I have gone through 3 boards in 2 RMAs and I'm not making any progress. Here is the list of steps that I have taken over the past few months.

My original build, January 2018

Asus x370 pro motherboard, Ryzen 1800x @4.00GHz, 2x8GB 3000MHz GSkill Trident Z RGB RAM @2933MHz, EVGA 850W PSU, EVGA 1060 3GB FTW GPU, Samsung 960 pro Nvme, and various other drives.

I built the computer as a school workstation/gaming rig. After about 15-16 months of using it I bought a new EVGA gtx 1080 ti for a steal at $500. Eagerly I installed it and ran into crashes with Origin games, I called EA and went through troubleshooting and realized it crashed on 3d mark and other games. I used it for schoolwork for about a week until I ran into the issue of it blue screening when I ran a simulation involving my research (I’m a computer engineering researcher at my university).Thinking it was my new graphics card I put it in another computer and flogged the living crap out of it for 3 days without any issues. After all updates including firmware I backed up all important files and started my windows 10 repair. Eventually I got to the point where I had installed Win 10 at least 5 times and installed Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 16.04, Windows Server 2016, and Windows Server 19 all on the x370 board. All had the same issue no matter the driver and graphics card combination.

I spent at least 10 days trouble shooting with my coworker to try and figure out which component was faulty swapping in various processors and boards with different graphics cards including my 1060 and a quadro p4000. I proceeded to test ALL of my other components on an asus b350 and a $40 asrock a320 board that I use at work as a drive copy machine that runs my nvme on crystal disk at over 3600MBps. My board was only running at 760MBps. I tested my components on a coworker’s gigabyte x470 as well and it worked fine.

I talked with EVGA and they said that it could be my PSU that is causing issues with the gpu so I sent it back to EVGA without any issues and received a new/refurbished one in about 5 days. Put it back in and guess what, same issues still continued.

Turns out the nmve slot was only using 1 pcie lane instead of the 4 it was supposed to have. Turned off the asmedia controller in the chipset and I got my 3000MBps read but it was a problem since I lost lanes on my GPU as well. So I sent the board back to Asus. I paid $20 for shipping (understandable not upset about it at all).

1^st board and RMA-

After I sent the board back I realized that I had issues with the board running slow and it was extremely difficult to get the RAM above 2133MHz on the ASUS Prime x370 board (I know that ryzen gen 1 was hard to get over 3000MHz). After they received the board I kept getting phone calls 1-3 times a day saying “We have received you board and it is in the process of being repaired.” I don’t mind a status update but when it’s on average 2 times a day for a week and there is no change from the previous call it gets annoying.

2^nd board and RMA-

All in all I received my second board since they were unable to repair it and swapped it for a new one. I plugged in my new board and Nothing happened, IT WOULDN’T EVEN POST. I thought I fried my 1800x so I put in my 2400g from my server and nothing happened, put my 1800x in the other board it worked just fine. I again tested all of my components in the other systems I had available to me and they all checked out. Called ASUS and said that they sent me a bad board, they said that I needed to pay for shipping. I argued for about 30 minutes saying no that they sent me a board that was DOA and I don’t think it is right that I have to pay to ship a product that they outright failed to check before they sent it out to a customer. I asked if I could pay the difference and get a hero VI x370 board that had the reset cmos button and bios rollback and they said they couldn’t do it. They asked what steps they needed to repeat the problem I responded with, “Just plug it in and see.” I wasn’t able to send the board for 2 or 3 days due to my busy school schedule. I finally sent it out and still received daily reminders for 2 days after I shipped it. I thought it was odd that they kept asking me for the tracking number even though they sent me the shipping label. I waited again for 2 weeks, 3 days shipping both ways and 10 days for “repairing” which was again another swap.

3^rd board and my current situation-

I received my third board on 7/20/19 and wasn’t able to install it until Monday. I plugged it in and it posted. Noticed it looked odd, NO RGB. It’s not that big of a deal I had this problem before after a bios update and fixed it by disabling the RGB in the BIOS then enabling it again. This didn’t fix my RGB problems and I called ASUS to see if there was something that I could do. I received an email that gave me a step by step of what I had already done, Update bios install Aura sync again ect. I continued to test the system with my school programs and some games and at the time of sending the email I was unable to get the computer stable enough to run any simulation or benchmark.

I responded with the following on Tuesday morning at about 10:30 eastern time.

John,

Thank you for the call and email. I regret to inform you that your steps did not resolve my RGB issue.

Also more importantly I am having an issue with all VGA cards. I have three different cards that I tried, EVGA 1060, EVGA 1080ti, and an NVidia Quadro 4000; all cause my applications to crash. Applications such as games, video rendering, and compiling code for my school work thesis. This is the most trouble I have ever had with a computer. I have again, same as after the previous two RMAs tested all of my components on other systems as well as swapped in other components to my 3 different boards. I took my RAM, CPU, GPU, and PSU and connected them to an ASUS B-350 and a $40 Asrock A-320 board that outperformed the higher end chipset that I have now had three of. I am unable to complete my school work at home and have to travel 45 minutes to my research lab to work on my thesis. I have done all BIOS updates and left the settings at default. I have looked online to see if there is something to change in the BIOS that will not cause it to crash. I have reinstalled windows on various drives, I had it set up in a dual boot with Ubuntu 16.04 which also had problems when using the Vulkan drivers for linux (which eliminates the possibility of driver issues) I also flogged my components with a different board on a benchmark for over 72 hours and they all checked out. I am working on an AI system for autonomous vehicles for my research project and I have now lost 6 weeks minimum on the shipping and “repairing” (which was just a swap) that have taken place due to the previous RMA’s.

Please help me with some steps that I can take just in case I left something out or overlooked a potential error.

I didn’t receive a reply so I called them 48 hours after I sent the email and my ticket was escalated a few hours later since they “had a problem with their system” when I called at 11:00 eastern time. I know it is just RGB but how would you feel if you bought a new car and the radio stopped working?

As of today 7/26/2019, I messed with it some more and did a roll back on the chipset driver and I’m now able to get the computer to work as intended without RGB though. I’m afraid that the RGB runs through the chipset and it is just a matter of time before it breaks again. Asus called me about 24 hours after they escalated my ticket and I walked him through this entire page or two of what I have done including all components that were in the computer at one point or another with the result of each. I was told that they are talking with the product engineer to see if any of it was incompatible.

I do not want another ASUS prime x370 pro board since they clearly have quality control issues. I will be more than happy to take them up on a refund, higher end x370 board that hopefully was binned better, or maybe an x470 board. At any rate I will not be purchasing another ASUS product for personal use, work (I’m a LAN Admin at a company of over 100000 employees and have already passed this along to the other IT employees), or for my research (I’m a graduate student doing research in AI and neural networks in my schools digital and computer research lab) for a while.

This was actually an issue because I wasn’t able to do research for my thesis at home and had to travel about 45 minutes to the lab to get any work done. I’m fortunate enough to have built another similar computer that is able to do some of the required work that I have to do but it isn’t the monster system that I built to run simulations in a time efficient manner.

Edited July 26, 2019 by Justin Rush
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