ASUS Crosshair VI Hero BIOS Brick

Bluefalcon13 said:

May the force be with you!

Side note, I think woomack lost his Asus Prime x370 today as well. Similar thing. I'm a little worried about getting an Asus board now :/

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What do you think about Gigabyte and ASRock?

wingman99 said:

What do you think about Gigabyte and ASRock?

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I liked my UD5 R5. No serious issues with it. One PWM header (of 2) didn't care and ran full tilt, and the gigabyte software stopped working randomly, bit I never used it anyways (system monitor, OC software, etc). Never had an MSI or ASRock board....

Had an Abit board many MANY moons ago, hen it's been Asus till the gigabyte board. The ASRock boards from reviewers are supposed to be solid, but lacking in BIOS stuff (memory settings, base clock, etc). I was looking at the carbon from MSI, but not quite ready to buy yet. Hoping to get more info on it first.

If I didn't have the Crosshair, I would have probably bought the ASRock Taichi myself. I like their Fatality line too. Basically, ASUS and ASRock are my go-to board manufacturers.

Hey guys, let's keep this thread for CH6 BIOS brick. If you'd like to start a general AM4 mobo thread please do

Well maybe it's related (or somewhat "tangentially-related") but has anyone heard of Asrock X370 Taichi boards being bricked while making the kinds of changes mentioned in this thread (or available to purchase to test if it bricks when doing the things mentioned in this thread?) I haven't seen any available at Amazon and I no longer shop at ...Egg so I haven't been able to find one.

Dolk said:

Hey guys, let's keep this thread for CH6 BIOS brick. If you'd like to start a general AM4 mobo thread please do

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New to the forum and Ryzen was my first water cooling build... unfortunately I bricked my X370-Pro Prime today. Had it up and running, booted from a hdd that had windows 10 installed from my previous build. Ran some basic benchmarks. No problems until I installed Asus AI software suite. started getting BSOD's. I think this would have been fixed if i used a fresh install of windows 10 instead of one harvested from another system.

Anyway, I went to play around with my memory timings. When set to automatic, my memory clock was 2133Hz... since my RAM is spec'd for 3200MHz and that also happens to be the highest option in the bios for memory speed, I thought I'd give that a try first. I changed no other settings, not even cpu OC or any voltages... strictly memory clockspeed which I thought I'd be able to reset by pulling the CMOS battery or clearing the bios settings with the CMOS reset pins or whatever you call them. Even left the CMOS batter out for 30 minutes... nope... 100% bricked.

Called up Asus (twice because the first rep had me on hold for 10 minutes before sending me to the survey) and the 2nd rep tried to tell me my RAM wasn't compatible but the board should still power on anyway. Maybe I misunderstand RAM compatibility, but my DDR4 TridentZ GSKILL memory fit in fine, booted Windows fine and even did a few benchmarks so I don't know how incompatible it can possibly be.

Looks like I'll be ordering a new board, though I'm going to avoid this batch of Asus boards... way too buggy for me.

Looks like another Prime X370 brick :/

And I literally just ordered one...

To be fair it seemed to be working fine... i'd just wait for a couple more bios revisions before touching anything like memory speed or overclock settings.

But the thing that did it was changing the memory speed. on my $60 junk MSI board running my FX-8350 that would be easy to recover from. Bridge two pins and you're back up. Maybe you'd have to unplug the PSU and make sure the caps get drained, but it would still be fine. Paying more than double the price of that board for this ASUS and I can't even change the memory clock speed without bricking it.

Looks like another brick. My board was running OK, decided to update the BIOS after a day of operating. Flashback via USB, loaded fine. Posted to ROG logo, "Updating BIOS do not turn off power...", bam, screen goes dark and that is the end of the story. It seems like there is a BIOS bug that fries a power controller in the BIOS Update of Death. ASUS is working on it, but there are going to be a lot of dead boards between now and then. Going to RMA the board.

See info here:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1624603/rog-crosshair-vi-overclocking-thread/680#post_25909202

Asus employee explaining what is going on.

Survived my second round of "Updating BIOS" looping without actually updating the BIOS. This time it was triggered by me rebooting after installing the new GeForce drivers. Was able to USB flashback out of it again, thankfully.

Hoping they come out with a new BIOS version to fix this **** before my board randomly bricks itself.

I heard some people are having better luck with EZ flash in Bios.

Just an FYI elmor posted this as a temporary fill till an new BIOS comes out. Not sure how it fixes the issue but here it is.

[quote name="elmor" url="/t/1624603/rog-crosshair-vi-overclocking-thread/750#post_25910153"]Still waiting for the BIOS. Until then you guys can lock the CPU SOC Voltage to default (Offset mode +0.00625V) to prevent this from happening.

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[/QUOTE]

Just a bit of an update/explanation http://www.overclock.net/t/1624603/rog-crosshair-vi-overclocking-thread/780#post_25910423

There's a new BIOS now. I will post it here. elmor still recommends keeping the SOC voltage to 1.15v or lower and says it should work for most ram frequencies.

View attachment CROSSHAIR-VI-HERO-ASUS-0902.zip

MNMadman said:

I had the "brick" problem (RGB LEDs and CPU LED green but no other activity) right from the start. Turns out it was a cooler mount problem. The instructions from EK regarding AMD installs say to keep the center section of the rubber gasket intact, but for some users that causes boot problems (yes I was using the new AM4 kit from them). I removed that center section and got my board to boot. I had a bad CPU too ("8" code) but when I replaced that yesterday it booted fine.

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I can verify this was also my problem.
Setup: ASUS x370-pro Prime, Ryzen 7 1800X, Supremacy EVO water block

I honestly thought this was a bit of a troll and couldn't see how it would work, but faced with an RMA, I thought it would be an easy test.

The only variable I intentionally changed was removing the center portion of the grommet on the AM4 mounting kit. Last night I was debugging with Asus tech support for an hour and they said RMA it. I spent a couple hours of my own time dicking around with it... nothing. Got home from work today to test it to see on the off chance if it would work, nothing.

Took off the water block and back plate, took out the center of the rubber grommet, re-assembled and BINGO!
Haven't run any boot tests yet, but I'm just glad that my board is beeping again

@MNMadman, if you send me a donation link like Paypal I'll happily buy you a pizza or a beer

Edit: This is REALLY weird to me because I was able to boot with the center of the grommet in and the board only became unresponsive after I changed the memory speed to 3200MHz, so I thought the bios had just fried. No clue why it suddenly became more sensitive to the backplate's grommet, or why its even a factor. Is it thermally restricitve? Not likely it would start for a second and shut off if it was. Electrically conductive? I certainly hope not! Maybe it's just putting pressure on the board in a bad spot? I'd like to hear EK's or Asus's input.

nichogenius said:

@MNMadman, if you send me a donation link like Paypal I'll happily buy you a pizza or a beer

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I appreciate the thought, but no thanks. I'm just glad to hear that something I posted helped you out.

nichogenius said:

Maybe it's just putting pressure on the board in a bad spot? I'd like to hear EK's or Asus's input.

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EK has already responded -- they have AMD-specific blocks now, and new instructions to use the existing backplate that comes with your AM4 board. It's likely a pressure issue.

So the prime x370s are good to go (for now)?

Bluefalcon13 said:

So the prime x370s are good to go (for now)?

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That's my question. I have seen just about nada regarding the Prime X370 Pro and how it is affected by the brick bug, memory issues and such. Just hoping that some of the gobs of information posted regarding CH6 Hero can be transferred. Anybody guess why there haven't been any threads started regarding the Prime X370? Is it because there haven't been any boards shipped yet for people to build with?

Keith Myers said:

That's my question. I have seen just about nada regarding the Prime X370 Pro and how it is affected by the brick bug, memory issues and such. Just hoping that some of the gobs of information posted regarding CH6 Hero can be transferred. Anybody guess why there haven't been any threads started regarding the Prime X370? Is it because there haven't been any boards shipped yet for people to build with?

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I wasn't concerned about it til 2 users reported issues with the board bricking. One of them posted above and it wasn't bricked, but was a problem with a water block. Just wondering if I am safe to use the x370-pro and go all ham on the BIOS when I get it next week...

Crosshair VI is good to use just as long as you don't raise the SOC voltage. So basically shy away from memory overclocking. BIOS fixes will be able to remove this issue. Good engineers are on the job.

Dolk said:

Crosshair VI is good to use just as long as you don't raise the SOC voltage. So basically shy away from memory overclocking. BIOS fixes will be able to remove this issue. Good engineers are on the job.

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You CAN raise it, just not as much with the 0902 BIOS. elmor recommends 1.15v-1.2v as the maximum for that. Raja was recommending 1.0v or less, but elmor set him straight.