ROG MAXIMUS Z690 Hero - Unable to restart from Windows

[TapioPix]

Hey all,

I have an odd situation where my PC will not restart from Windows. If I select 'restart' in the Windows menu, the machine appears to do the restart, but then hangs in POST. The MB shows QCODE 97 when this happens.
Pressing the case or board reset button results in a successful boot, as does powering off and pressing the power button. Once up and running, the system is completely stable.

Any idea what is going on here? It's not a massive issue but it's annoying, especially during updates etc, and I feel there's probably an obvious cause / solution...

The only potentially 'unusual' setting I have is that IOMMU is disabled because of a legacy audio card which would otherwise causes driver crashes. I have some mild overclocking in place and I'm using XMP-2 for the memory, but have confirmed that this issue is also present when I revert to stock settings.

Cheers,
Geoff


System details:
CPU: Intel i9-12900k
MB: ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z690 Hero (BIOS 1403)
RAM: Corsair Vengeance DDR5 64GB (2x32GB) 5200MHz CAS40
GPU: ASUS TUF NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 12GB
SSD: Seagate FireCuda 530 4TB
PCIe: Intel 10G Ethernet Adapter X550-T2
PCIe: ASUS Xonar Essence STX Audio (this is what needs IOMMU to be off)
Power supply: BeQuiet 1000W
OS: Windows 10 x64 Enterprise

[Silent Scone@ROG]

Hello,


97 is a VGA Code. Are you running the latest VBIOS revision?

[TapioPix]

Hello,
97 is a VGA Code. Are you running the latest VBIOS revision?

I've checked GPU BIOS and it is up to date (I tried the update tool from the support section and it said the version installed was already the latest). Could it somehow relate to the onboard graphics (Intel) rather than the PCIe card? I have both enabled for rendering, with the BIOS set to have PCIe as primary..

I found a thread that suggested this behaviour might be fixed by running "bcdboot C:\windows" from an elevated command prompt - initially it seemed to fix it but then the problem returned...

Any other ideas?

Cheers,
Geoff

[Silent Scone@ROG]

I've checked GPU BIOS and it is up to date (I tried the update tool from the support section and it said the version installed was already the latest). Could it somehow relate to the onboard graphics (Intel) rather than the PCIe card? I have both enabled for rendering, with the BIOS set to have PCIe as primary..

I found a thread that suggested this behaviour might be fixed by running "bcdboot C:\windows" from an elevated command prompt - initially it seemed to fix it but then the problem returned...

Any other ideas?

Cheers,
Geoff

You can try disabling iGPU to rule this out, sure.


The update tool can sometimes be temperamental, you can confirm VBIOS revision on GPUZ




Possibly try a different DP cable, too.

[TapioPix]

You can try disabling iGPU to rule this out, sure.


The update tool can sometimes be temperamental, you can confirm VBIOS revision on GPU


Possibly try a different DP cable, too.

iGPU being enabled or not made no difference

GPU BIOS is 94.02.71.80.79

I tried unplugging the two monitors in turn and actually removing one of them resulted in proper restart behaviour - I then re-seated that cable at both ends and it seems to be ok now... I will believe in in a few days after some real-world usage rather than just restarting immediately after logging in, but that might actually have fixed it!

I'll try to come back and post whether this fixed it permanently, but if you're reading this in the future and there are no futher replies, that was probably the end of it and you should check your cables..!

[UPDATE] The problem came back but pulling out the 'problem' sound card that would BSOD without disabling IOMMU seems to have done the trick. Perhaps the time has come to no longer use that...

Thanks for the help