ASUS Anti-Surge problem. Maximus VIII Extreme

[TheSpaceMonkey]

Hello there. I just built my new gaming PC and as many other users of ASUS's  Z170 chipset motherboards, I'm facing some issues with the stupid ASUS Anti-surge system.

 

When the first failure occurred I was under almost idle load on my system, just installing some Steam games, and suddenly my system shut itself down (with 1 or 2 seconds showing some changes on my fans behavior, what makes me think that it was not a simple power outage, but an "intentional" shutdown mechanism triggered by my motherboard (which is a ASUS Maximus VIII Extreme). After the system shutdown, I notice several tries of boot (without my interference, just the PC trying to turn itself on), with no post at all. Just turning on and off repeatedly for about 4 or 5 times, until I switched my PSU off. After that, the system booted properly (with NO error messages during the boot process), and was working fine, until approximately 24 hours later.

 

One day later I faced a system reset, and the system posted with a ASUS anti-surge system error notification. The message was "Asus anti-surge was triggered to protect system from unstable power supply". I honestly don't think the problem is on my PSU... I have a Corsair AX1200i 80 Plus Platinum (a pretty decent power supply). After that, using Corsair Link software, I spent a long time monitoring/logging my 12v, 5v and 3.3v power lines, and they're pretty stable...

 

12v: oscillating between 12.0v ~ 12.06v

5v: oscillating between 5v ~ 5.03v

3.3v: oscillating between  3.3v ~ 3.34v

 

After this issue, I already spent about 8 straight hours playing The Division on ultra quality (quite a heavy/resource consuming game), with no instability at all, but after that, I faced the problem once again with my system absolutely idle. System shutting down abruptly and a post right after that giving me the anti-surge warning.

 

After searching for some posts on ASUS's RoG forums, I noticed a lot of users complaining about ASUS's anti-surge system, and many of them was suggesting that this feature should be disabled on it's UEFI option to avoid the problem.

 

Here lies my concern... Is it safe to run my system without this feature? To be honest, this "new" feature doesn't seem to be working properly yet, and it seems to be causing more problems than protection to the system.

 

I'd like to have some thoughts about that. Have you guys faced similar problems with Z170 chipset based motherboards?

 

Additional information:

 

The system is not overclocked at all yet. The only changes I've made on my UEFI was to activate XMP Profile 1 for my DDR4 (Corsair Dominator Platinum 16GB - 4x4GB - 2666Mhz), and to set my Corsair Carbide 540 case fans to be at a fixed 900 RPM. (BTW: In despite of having a 4 channel memory kit, CPU-Z says my memory is working in dual channel mode).

 

*** EDIT *** possibly related issue: I'm using Windows 10 Pro 64bits, and I can restart my system, but when I try to shut it down from Windows, it prepares itself to shut down, turns off my video card signal, but the system (fans, leds on motherboard) keeps running with no video. I already saw some posts related to similar issues, but all of them mentioning Windows 7 specific problematic services.

 

Thoughts? Thanks in advance guys!

 

Full System Specs:

 

CPU - Intel Core i7-6700
Motherboard - ASUS Maximus VIII Extreme
RAM - Corsair Dominator Platinum Series 16GB (4x4GB)
GPU - EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti SC+ ACX 2.0+
Case - Corsair Carbide Series Air 540 Silver Edition
Storage - Kingston HyperX Savage 480GB
PSU - Corsair AX1200i 80 PLUS Platinum

 

Here follows some CPU-Z screenshots.

Edited April 17, 2016 by TheSpaceMonkey

[Enderman]

Well i know once in the past another user came for help on LTT forum because his build wasnt working

turns out he disabled anti surge to fix some issue like this "because (someone) told me to" and his entire build got fried

*i cant remember if that someone was asus or a manufacturer of one of his other parts

 

so before you do this i highly suggest you test every component separately or borrow a PSU to test with to make sure that's not the issue

[TheSpaceMonkey]

9 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Well i know once in the past another user came for help on LTT forum because his build wasnt working

turns out he disabled anti surge to fix some issue like this "because (someone) told me to" and his entire build got fried

*i cant remember if that someone was asus or a manufacturer of one of his other parts

 

so before you do this i highly suggest you test every component separately or borrow a PSU to test with to make sure that's not the issue

 

Seems absolutely reasonable and safe. But don't you think that a defective PSU wouldn't be able to deliver stable power lines for an extended period with demanding tasks? I know that ANY high end product can be defective in despite of it's overall quality. But besides the fact that Corsair AX1200i is a trustworthy PSU, this same PSU on this same system allowed me to play an extremely resource intensive game for 8 hours straight, with absolute stability. That's why I find it so hard to believe that the PSU is really causing dangerous power instability.

[Enderman]

1 minute ago, TheSpaceMonkey said:

 

Seems absolutely reasonable and safe. But don't you think that a defective PSU wouldn't be able to deliver stable power lines for an extended period with demanding tasks? I know that ANY high end product can be defective in despite of it's overall quality. But besides the fact that Corsair AX1200i is a trustworthy PSU, this same PSU on this same system allowed me to play an extremely resource intensive game for 8 hours straight, with absolute stability. That's why I find it so hard to believe that the PSU is really causing dangerous power instability.

Sometimes stuff works at full load but not at idle

thats just how electronics are

some people have overclocks that work when stress testing that are unstable at idle, i know its weird but thats how it is

 

i know the AX1200i is a trustworthy PSU

I also had a trustworthy PSU and it killed my entire PC

so just because its trustworthy doesnt rule it out of the equation

you need to test with a second PSU to be 100% sure that the 1200i isnt the problem

[TheSpaceMonkey]

18 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Sometimes stuff works at full load but not at idle

thats just how electronics are

some people have overclocks that work when stress testing that are unstable at idle, i know its weird but thats how it is

 

i know the AX1200i is a trustworthy PSU

I also had a trustworthy PSU and it killed my entire PC

so just because its trustworthy doesnt rule it out of the equation

you need to test with a second PSU to be 100% sure that the 1200i isnt the problem

 

You're absolutely right. Better safe than sorry. I'll give it a try with my AX860i for 2 or 3 days and check if the problem persists. The AX860i is perfectly tested as it runs almost 24x7 on my streaming build, with no issues at all. I'll post any updates once the tests lead me to any conclusion about the PSU being or not the cause of my anti-surge issue. Thanks for being supportive buddy!

 

Besides the anti-surge, I'd really like to find out if the Windows shut down problem (that I mentioned on the topic) is more likely to be a OS problem or a hardware related one.

 

Cheers.

[Enderman]

7 minutes ago, TheSpaceMonkey said:

 

You're absolutely right. Better safe than sorry. I'll give it a try with my AX860i for 2 or 3 days and check if the problem persists. The AX860i is perfectly tested as it runs almost 24x7 on my streaming build, with no issues at all. I'll post any updates once the tests lead me to any conclusion about the PSU being or not the cause of my anti-surge issue. Thanks for being supportive buddy!

 

Besides the anti-surge, I'd really like to find out if the Windows shut down problem (that I mentioned on the topic) is more likely to be a OS problem or a hardware related one.

 

Cheers.

about the OS issue, how long do they run for? do they turn off after a few minutes?

asus motherboards have a feature that lets stuff run after shut down for a while to cool things off, that might be causing it

 

other than that, the only issue i could think of causing that is a windows 10 upgrade with no clean install

[TheSpaceMonkey]

1 minute ago, Enderman said:

about the OS issue, how long do they run for? do they turn off after a few minutes?

asus motherboards have a feature that lets stuff run after shut down for a while to cool things off, that might be causing it

 

other than that, the only issue i could think of causing that is a windows 10 upgrade with no clean install

Last time I tried I waited for about 3 minutes, with no turn off at all.

 

My Windows 10 install is a clean one (not an upgrade). It was installed from a W10 thumbdrive on a totally clean SSD.

[Enderman]

2 minutes ago, TheSpaceMonkey said:

Last time I tried I waited for about 3 minutes, with no turn off at all.

 

My Windows 10 install is a clean one (not an upgrade). It was installed from a W10 thumbdrive on a totally clean SSD.

try waiting for 5 minutes or longer next time

but if its not the "keep fans running after system shutdown" setting in the UEFI then idk what causes that issue