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Maximus VI Hero BSOD 0xf4

GreggMack
Level 9
I have had a rather strange, and frustrating problem with my ASUS Maximus VI Hero board. I occasionally would get a BSOD (BlueScreen of Death) with an error code of 0xf4. The BSOD occurres when I insert or extract a USB flash drive into either the rear or front panel USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 ports. Not every time, but about 20% of the time. The problem also has occurred when simply inserting a DVD into the ASUS DVD burner and closing the door. The same problem has occurred when I turned off a photo printer! The photo printer is attached to a USB 2.0 port on a PCIe expansion card installed in the last x4 PCIe slot. These BSOD 0xf4 crashes would occur even while in Windows' Safe Mode. It does not matter if I am running at overclocked or default CPU frequency.

I have tried everything imaginable to fix this very frustrating problem. I have reinstalled Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium, with all of the latest drivers offered from the ASUS web site (and tested the system before reinstalling any application programs). I've run memory test for days at a time. I've run AIDA64 and RealBench for hours and hours.

After a couple of very frustrating months, I finally realized that all of these IO connections were controlled by the Z87 chipset, not directly by the CPU...

After coming to this realization, I increased the PCH Voltage from +1.050V to +1.0625V (and +1.06875 and +1.0750V). I have not seen this dreaded BSOD 0xf4 since. (Taking this PCH Voltage higher to, say +1.09375V did result in another occurrence of BSOD 0xf4, so I immediately dropped it back down below +1.0750V, and eventually have settled on +1.0625V.)

It's a bit early to tell if that is the ultimate fix for my system, but it certainly has made for a dramatic improvement in trying to eliminate this BSOD 0xf4 situation.
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18 REPLIES 18

ristok
Level 7
Just an update: I'm beginning to believe that the culprit is the usb3 frontport of my fractal define R4 case itself. Just got a bsod just by touching the "outer rim"/casing of the port.

HiVizMan
Level 40
Oh that is not good mate.

Please pull your board and check all the cables for small nicks or any signs of shorting or earthing.
To help us help you - please provide as much information about your system and the problem as possible.

Wires/cables seem fine, I checked all the of them. Also took the usb2/3 front port module/port housing from the case and it seemed fine. Maybe I was wrong about the usb3 being at fault. Since the last bsod I disconnected the usb3 wire, and left the usb2 in place. And I just got another bsod from connecting iphone5 the the usb2 port.

It is difficult to determine the cause of the bsods, because I can connect cables etc. to the ports many many times without bsods. If there were a short circuit somewhere, wouldn't it cause a bsod every time?

One thing in common with the bsod could be that they happen after a "cold" boot (by this I mean that the computer has been turned off and disconnected from the wall for the night/weekend). And then it works fine as long as I don't put anything to the usb-ports. Newest bsod: 33286

GreggMack
Level 9
Hey, I haven't been on the ASUS forums for a few weeks, but after I had my first BSOD with error code 0xf4 in a couple of weeks, I thought I would check in here. I have saved at least 25 of the MiniDump files, and would be happy to share them with anyone who might be interested in seeing them. The majority of them are from my first Maximus VI Hero board, but over the last 5 weeks, I do have at least 3 of them from my second Maximus VI Hero board. Does anyone have a suggestion of where I could upload these MiniDump files to? If not, I suppose I could zip them up and put them and put them on my own personal web site, and provide the link to that zip archive here.

GreggMack
Level 9
Hey, I have saved at least 25 of the Windows MiniDump files. I would be more than happy to share them with anyone who can read then and make some sense of what's in them!

GreggMack
Level 9
If anyone is interested in examining some of my MiniDumps, I have put them all into a small 2.03 MB zip archive here:

http://greggmack.com/gm-downloads/BSOD_0xf4.zip

GreggMack
Level 9
ristok, it appears that there are at least 3 of us with this problem. Have you ever experienced this by doing anything other that USB insertion or extraction?

GreggMack wrote:
ristok, it appears that there are at least 3 of us with this problem. Have you ever experienced this by doing anything other that USB insertion or extraction?


There has been maybe two bsods where computer has been in idle, only running firefox and lightroom (can't remember were there any usb-devices plugged in at front). One bsod during testing memory with memtest, bsod after 8h of testing. At first I suspected that bsods were connected to memory, but I haven't succeeded in reproducing the bsod with any program (memtest / burntest).

Currently I'm using only rear usb-ports and no problems so far, but it doesn't mean much because previously the time between bsods have varied greatly.

GreggMack
Level 9
After 4 months, I now believe that I have solved my BSOD 0xf4 problem. I was searching around on the Microsoft support web site, where I ran across KB977178, where it describes Windows 7 machines that might give that BSOD code when waking from Sleep, and having a large SATA drive.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977178

My C:\ drive is a Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB SSD, but I also had two WD1002FAEX 1TB HDDs in the system. I started checking all three for any abnormal signs. chkdsk never found any problems, and sfc /scannow always ran clean. When I installed PassMark's Performance Test PC Benchmarking software, and went into the Options to change which drive it would test, one of my two 1TB WD HDDs was only getting about 60% of the bandwidth that the other identical drive was reporting.

Since I had already tried everything else, I ordered a newer WD1003FZEX for US$90. This newer version was even much faster than either of the WD1002FAEX drives, and I have not seen another BSOD 0xf4 in the 3 weeks since I changed that slower drive out.

I can only speculate as to why a slow, non-boot HDD would occasionally cause a BSOD 0xf4 when doing things like turning off a printer, inserting or removing a USB flash drive. The only thing that I can think is that the Z87 was too busy retrying, or otherwise dealing with a problematic drive to allow it to service the other I/O functions that it controls in a timely fashion. That is speculation on my part, but I now feel confident that I no longer have that very frustrating problem with my computer.