Asus mainboard keeps crashing on certain workloads.

[Christanoid]

Hi,

 

let me start this right off the bat saying that this is not an issue anyone here will likely be able to truly fix. This is a known issue with Asus boards that they can't get themselves to fix.

The problem is Ultimaker Cura and other applications crashing AMD Ryzen based Asus mainboard due to faulty reporting of C-States. This has been confirmed multiple times by Cura engineers / developers. The threads are the following:

https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura/issues/6855

https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura/issues/5265
https://community.ultimaker.com/topic/35408-pc-crashes-when-using-cura/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Cura/comments/gluwuw/is_cura_still_crashing_amd_based_systems/

https://community.ultimaker.com/topic/26654-cura-crashes-my-entire-computer/

.... And many more.

 

This is not a rare issue. It is well known.

So why am I here? Well simple. To make people aware that sadly and quite frankly Asus does not care a single bit. Let me elaborate. In Summer of 2021 I messages Asus support about this, at first they asked the default questions about my PC, which I all answered. I also right from the get-go told them that this is a known issue that many users are facing. 

After a lot of back and forth and trying some default advise they gave me the crashing persisted and after me asking them several times if they can please inform their engineering team about this they sent me a sheet to fill out that they will pass to their headquaters as a bug report. Yay. Victory. 

I filled out their form and sent it to them. They said they'd send it to their headquaters and get back to me within a week. It has been almost a year.

 

So. What now? I don't know. I mitigated the Problem by going into task manager every time I start the application and redoing the CPU core assignment for the cura task to only see 2 cores on my system which appears to work so far, but this is not a solution. A solution would be a bit of publicity finally getting Asus to do something instead of sitting on the money they got from me for a board that is pretty useless for my use case. Maybe my hope here is that someone from the Ltt team *wink wink* can use their direct links to the engineering team to make them aware of this issue.

This is a behavior that is just inacceptable from a multi billion dollar company. As all the tickets above show I am not a single user with the problem. It is widespread and nothing helps. Updating BIOS, nothing, swapping CPU, nothing. This is on Asus table and they don't care.  

 

[AKS_Adrian]

Wow, this still isn't fixed? I had this same issue with some AMD FX and Ryzen boards. I was not able to fix it either. Sorry for this unhelpful reply, but I'm gonna follow this to see if anyone has a solution at all.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I find the whole discussion quite puzzling, surely if the CPU requests C6/C7 state and the motherboard ignores it, that shouldn't cause a crash as all that is happening is the motherboard hasn't reduced its power delivery?  Does the CPU seriously sit and wait for confirmation and thus freeze if it never comes?

 

Also if this was truly the issue, surely everyone with Ryzen on ASUS boards would be getting regular crashes just sat idle on the desktop, it would have been noticed by reviewers long ago if so.   I have an ASUS X570-F GAMING with a 5950X, leave it sat idle all the time, see most cores in sleep state in Ryzen Master, never locked up.  So there must be more to this issue than this unless its not an issue on X570 boards.

[Christanoid]

1 hour ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

I find the whole discussion quite puzzling, surely if the CPU requests C6/C7 state and the motherboard ignores it, that shouldn't cause a crash as all that is happening is the motherboard hasn't reduced its power delivery?  Does the CPU seriously sit and wait for confirmation and thus freeze if it never comes?

 

Also if this was truly the issue, surely everyone with Ryzen on ASUS boards would be getting regular crashes just sat idle on the desktop, it would have been noticed by reviewers long ago if so.   I have an ASUS X570-F GAMING with a 5950X, leave it sat idle all the time, see most cores in sleep state in Ryzen Master, never locked up.  So there must be more to this issue than this unless its not an issue on X570 boards.

Are you sure that it is not lowering it's power state instead of not upping it?

 

From what I read it's not the idle that is crashing it but how Cura idles. I recall to have read somewhere that Cura does very short calculations in the background with a fairly fast interval. That causes the CPU to constantly swap power states up and down until at some point the Mainboard gives up.

[Alex Atkin UK]

1 hour ago, Christanoid said:

Are you sure that it is not lowering it's power state instead of not upping it?

 

From what I read it's not the idle that is crashing it but how Cura idles. I recall to have read somewhere that Cura does very short calculations in the background with a fairly fast interval. That causes the CPU to constantly swap power states up and down until at some point the Mainboard gives up.

I can see how that could be an issue, but not why it would specifically impact ASUS boards.  Have ASUS set their BIOS to enter sleep too quickly or something?