ASUS Z97 Motherboards - Overview and Official Support Thread

[Clintlgm]

I might have miss this somewhere in this thread, My question is What M.2 SSD will boot or which drivers All I can find it PCIe, which they all are. So is it AHCI, SATA NVMe has anyone run a Samsung 950?

[jrmpt]

Dear Nate (or any other)

Can't pass 4.6Ghz with reasonable voltage, maybe I'm missing some BIOS settings. Looking for advice.


Load Optimized Defaults
Loaded the XPM
CPU Core Ratio min/max Auto/45x, Adaptive at 1.220v
Cache Ratio min/max 39x/39x, manual at 1.15v
LoadLine Calibration at LV4
Spread Spectrum Off

Pass w/o problems long runs of Asus RB, OCCT or IXTU. Never passes from 65c.

When trying for 4.6Ghz, not even with 1.28 can do it (or 4.7 with 1.3v)

Any tips?

Thanks

[Nate152]

Hi jrmpt

Try adding a little more cpu core voltage.

[jrmpt]

Dear Nate,
Do you think that is only a question of voltage? Its a big wall, from 1.22 to more than 1.28 for 100mhz

Thanks

Hi jrmpt

Try adding a little more cpu core voltage.

[Nate152]

On average you'll need about .05v to hit the next 100MHz, give it a try and see if it stabilizes.

Clintlgm - The 950 pro is an NVME drive.

[jrmpt]

Hi Nate,
I'm pushing my 1866 ram to 2133. According with Raja posts, the System Agent should be set to 1.15v and the ANALOG/DIGITAL offset also to 1.15. The BIOS shows the SA as 0,824 but dont' show the values for the other two. How can I know/check the actual values? System let me set them from 0,001 to 0,999.

Thanks

[Nate152]

All right

That must be the cpu system agent offset voltage, if it's running at .824v try an offset of +.335v, this should put the cpu system agent voltage at 1.15v - 1.16v.

[jrmpt]

Nate, my problem is the DIGITAL/ANALOG IO. I've no means to know the actual voltage.

Thanks

[Nate152]

Well I never owned a z97 board but you could try raising the cpu system agent offset voltage +.335v and let the digital analog voltage on auto, without knowing what it's set to from the start I can't say what voltage to use.

[pmatil]

I've recently purchased a Z97-K/USB3.1 M/B. With it I got an Intel 600p series M.2 SSD (256 GB). However, the M/B did not detect the SSD at all. There was nothing in the NVMe menu in BIOS. The BIOS is the latest available version: 0702.

All of the components in the said machine are new. I don't use any overclock settings. No other PCIe devices either and hadn't tried the SSD with a PCIe adaptor.

I tried the SSD with a friend's H170 Pro M/B and it detected it just fine. To install Windows 10 I got a regular SATA SSD but still the M.2 drive did not show up in Windows in any way.

I have already returned the SSD to the store I bought it from and they confirmed it's working just fine.

Sad that some of these Z97 M/Bs have a pretty vague support of M.2 drives. Also for this M/B the M.2 is only x2 so no performance increase either from regular SATA. Since this is a pretty old board no hope for BIOS update anymore.

Second issue is fan control. Just to share my experience in case someone else needs this information. Now this M/B has 2 case fan headers in addition to the CPU fan header. All headers are 4-pin and the manual states that the case fans can be configured for either DC- or PWM-mode in BIOS. DC mode for 3-pin case fans works just fine BUT the CPU fan can only be adjusted if it's a 4-pin PWM fan. There is no selection of the control mode in BIOS. At first I didn't realize this and my CPU fan was at 100 % all the time.

I've read about different control methods and pinouts in some other thread here. It seems that only the CPU fan header is a true PWM header since it has PWM_IN pin but the chassis fans only have a fixed +5 V pin. If this is the case, what is the purpose of the DC/PWM selection in BIOS?

So bear in mind that if you get a CPU cooler which only has 3-pin fans like mine (Noctua NH-U9B SE2), they will be at 100 % all the time and not controllable by temperature.

Third issue is that the Asus AI Suite crashes after a while every time in Windows 10 Home 64-bit when used for fan control. So unusable for me. Luckily the fans can be configure in BIOS as well.