Frozen Time Clock in UEFI - The Fix

[Raja]

Is your motherboard suffering from the malady of a frozen time clock in UEFI?

If so try the following:

1) Reflash the latest UEFI, using EZ Flash 2 or USB BIOS flashback.

2) When the system POSTs, enter UEFI. Once in UEFI power down the motherboard. Keep the PSU attached and "on". Only the motherboard is powered off and in "standby". You will see the MB standby lights on (boards with start buttons onboard will be lit). Standby does not mean the board is actually running, standby means the board has power, but you have not pressed the power button to turn it on. Make sure the board is off before you go to the next step in this list. You will know if it is off because if you leave it for 5 seconds it should not POST~BOOT - this means it is in standby.



3) Clear CMOS (Clear RTC) for 10 seconds. This will clear the Management Engine.

4) Power up the system, enter UEFI, set the clock and then save and exit.

5) Update MEI driver to Version 9.5.14.1724 in the OS.









6 )Carry on using the system as normal.

The above steps should fix the issue.

-Raja

[JackNaylorPE]

Mine goes weeks without an issue and then bam....have to reload BIOS 3 times in a day. I don't have sleep on and I can't even envision the concept of hibernate on a desktop.

No, it's definitely not the OC .... it happens without the OC ..... and if I bought an $300 overclocking enthusiasts board that I can't use at even built in 42 "Level Up" OC or any of my own, I'd still want it fixed. besides this is not supposed to be possible.... the board is designed to recover from a OC and no OC should ever affect the BIOS clock ....

If it was OC, how could the problem exist even after CMOS Clearing and resetting to defaults.

Really screwed up my file system. At night 6 machines back up to a HD on this system and we now have no way of knowing which versions are the "newest".

[clubfoot]

I agree that you shouldn't be having clock issues, my HERO has been great,....knock wood. BTW you have one Bad Arse fully loaded system there 🙂 It may sound silly but have you tried replacing the battery with a new one or at least cleaning it with alcohol and installing it without touching the contact surfaces? It's a stretch,....but.

[JackNaylorPE]

You are talking about .....

1. Draining the loop.
2. Removing the Reservoir, both GFX cards, cables, rigid acrylic tubing, motherboard, motherboard thermal armor and backplate.
3. Replacing battery.
4. Re-installing the motherboard thermal armor and backplate, Motherboard, rigid acrylic tubing , cables, both GFX cards and reservoir.
5. Buying another $50 worth of coolant and refilling the loop.

Peeps who have to go thru less effort have done that have done it w/o success. I coulkd see a battery issue being a one of instance but there's 4 or 5 threads here on RoG Forums on the topic and that many peeps can't have bad / dirty batteries.

I expect that the reason the Z97 version of the Maximus VII Formula is not out along w/ the other RoG Z97 boards is they spent some extra time redesigning the board so ya could replace the battery without having to remove the MoBo from the case and taking the armor off.

I'm confident that now that Asus has a frozen board in hand, they will be able to figure it out..... hopefully a BIOS fix will nail it down.

[clubfoot]

Sorry, don't have this issue with the HERO battery access. Good luck.

[JhonnyQ]

Hello, just came to give my 2 cents.
Im from Argentina, bought a Gryphon Z87 (without shield) on november 2013. Setted up the rig and a few days in, got the frozen clock bug. Im not really into overclocking; the only two things I remember changing were the bios quick setup profile to performance, and the HD booting order. Got rid of the error twice by resetting the bios as stated here (http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?35490-Sabertooth-Z87-Bios-Clock-Issue&p=297181&viewfull=1#p...). I dont quite remember if the second time I setted the profile on performance or just left it on normal.

Now, for some reason I feel this little detail is important; I NEVER shut down or reset this pc unleast I absolutely need to do so. Both times the bug appeared, I was on the process of completing the pc software setup; installing, updating, etc, so I needed to restart frequently. After those two times the clock froze, I finished the set up and reseted the bios for the second time. The PC has been up and running without errors since then, with pretty much 99% uptime. So, I'm probablly wrong but... is it possible this issue somehow gets triggered on boot up?.

[JackNaylorPE]

I think you are right in a sense. I sit at my desk and generally work on my lappie. The desktop sits there idle most of the day acting as a SOHO file server and normally doesn't see to much action unless I have a lot of CAD work to do or play some game at night. But eeking out performance is as much fun as gaming so I tent to experiment a lot. Having the puter sitting there doing nothing allows me to do that without impacting my productivity so why not. But we all sleep, so it's common for people to do a stress test while they do that. But while doing so, I keep trying to duplicate the bug paying attention to what can trigger it.

Twice now I have noticed that I have BSOD'd sometime during the night, and woke up to a the Blue Screen. Clock froze..... So I think you are right that something during either the shut down of start up process hiccups and the clock freezes.

Another way I can create it is to use RoG Real Bench and stop it midsteam .... sometimes it doesn't respond and maybe the freeze or trying to close it again triggers something. Those are the only two common and by "common" I mean it happened twice other than what I mentioned in a post previous page.

I believe one of the Asus reps here or someone else indicated that it might be related to saving or loading OC profiles. I know that loading saved OC profiles from a USB is a sure way to freeze the system rendering the USB useless ..... after it wouldn't load the OC profiles it also wouldn't read the USB. Since you are not overclocking, you likely are not using the profile tool.

EDIT: After a few more freezes, I complete my OC tweaking and I am beginning to think it is in fact related to OC Profiles. I had just kept saved one profile, the one I was the testing, and worked my way though. When all was done, I entered all of my 6 profiles and saved them, entering 46/43/43/2400 and saving it and then loading 45/45/45/2400 as my "everyday profile" for now. About half hour later hit the sack, booted up this morning and it had frozen at 11:24 pm. Not going to enter any more profiles and see how I do.

[WeelyTM]

Try check your event logs, see if there are any errors reported in the System or Application logs around that time or a bit before? Also, I notice you are running a pair of 840 Pro 256GB SSDs, that's my boot drive. Any chance you run Samsung Magician, or enabled HW Fastboot or IRST or ISCT in the bios? I thought I might've played with those before I flashed my bios, but I'm not sure and I forgot to log those settings before I flashed. And I used to let Magician launch on startup, but I don't anymore.

[JackNaylorPE]

No items in event logs.

I remember installing it .... opened Magician it once in 1st few days, never since.....it was how I discovered that Samsung doesn't like RAID or Windows Performance Mode.


EDIT: Well I'm done ..... finished my OC tweaking, gave up on saving / loading OC Profiles as usage is a likely cause and dialed in a 45/ multiplier / 45 cache / 2400 RAM setup figuring to live with that until the BIOS thing gets worked out.


Looked over from my laptop to the desktop at about 4:15 to see if my scheduled backup had run. No go. Looked at clocks and it said 2:32 .... BISO clock stopped at 1:17

So with no more Profiles to use, I did create a favorites page so I could easily load my settings in the correct order.

[clubfoot]

Just my 02c but don't use hardware fast boot and your cache should be 42 for a 45 o/c (based on the guide) and personal experience. I can also boot and run windows and all my software at 45 cache, but RB video encoding and multi tasking tests would blue screen at 45 cache. Most folks don't use a swap file with SSDs but,...see if one stabilizes RB especially when running a fast RAID setup as you do. Do you have the SSDs on Intel port 0 and 1?

[JackNaylorPE]

clubfoot wrote:
Just my 02c but don't use hardware fast boot and your cache should be 42 for a 45 o/c (based on the guide) and personal experience. I can also boot and run windows and all my software at 45 cache, but RB video encoding and multi tasking tests would blue screen at 45 cache. Most folks don't use a swap file with SSDs but,...see if one stabilizes RB especially when running a fast RAID setup as you do. Do you have the SSDs on Intel port 0 and 1?

The advice is to have cache at no more than 3 below multiplier cause at that point it starts to affect performance. But it also happens at 45/42 and stock settings.

From Wickman's link ....

UEFI builds 2*** released or will be up shortly on the support pages - fix list states RTC stop issue cured:

Model Name BIOS ECN NO.
Z87-A 2005 EN-0204103

thru

VANGUARD-B85 2004 EN-0204173

ROG boards to follow.

A Big THANK YOU to Raja for putting up with all us frustrated "Whinerbaggers" for the last 8 months ! But not like I gonna let you off easy .... questions"

1. Will this make it into BIOS 15xx (in Beta last I looked) or we wait for 16xx ?

2. Are Z97 boards so afflicted ?

3. Is this also affecting the "freeze" problem saving / loading OC profiles and backing them up to USB ?