cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Faulty ASMedia SATA Controller on Z790 Maximus Extreme

SBLive
Level 8
I have a brand new Z790 Maximus Extreme. Accessing drives plugged into the SATA6G_E1-E2 ports (on ASMedia controller) hard-freezes the system after about 10 seconds of copying a file to/from the drives. Sometimes it will cause a CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT BSOD instead.

Same drives plugged into SATA6G_1-4 ports (on Intel controller) work fine. Same issue occurs with different drives plugged into the SATA6G_E1-E2 ports.

System passes all stress and stability tests (Cinebench, AIDA64, MemTest86). System has the latest drivers and Windows 11 updates installed.

Issue occurs both on the 0502 BIOS and the 0703 BIOS with default settings.

All of my other SATA ports are populated with SSDs, as this is a music production machine, so I can't switch over to the Intel controller.

I've searched online and it looks like this ASMedia SATA controller causes lots of issues. Sounds like it's a hardware failure since it was working fine for the first four days I've had the board and suddenly failed last night.
910 Views
3 REPLIES 3

STARRAIN_ROG
Customer Service Agent
Hi SBLive,
Based on your cross check result, looks like the SATA6G_E1-E2 ports are defective.
Please send the motherboard to our RMA for further examination or consult the retailer first if you bought it recently.
Thank you.

Thanks Starrain, Newegg is sending a replacement.

Can confirm the ASMedia SATA6G_E1-E2 ports are working perfectly on the replacement board.

One thing I noticed is the ASMedia controller has been moved from a PCI 3.0 x1 connection on the Z690 ME to a PCI 2.0 x1 connection on the Z790 ME and its effective bandwidth has been cut in half. Checking it via AIDA64 confirms this PCIe lane allocation, and testing confirms the cut down bandwidth. On my previous board, the Z690 Maximus Extreme, the ASMedia controller could pull 960MB/sec with two drives in RAID0, but on the Z790 it can barely do 450MB/sec with the same drives in RAID0.