Maximus VIII Hero / i7 6700 Stuck on Super IO Initialization

[GenerousGuava]

Hey everyone,

I recently bought a brand new VIII Hero for my GF after having a great experience with the VI Hero in my own PC. However, I've run into a bit of a snag: The mainboard will POST (or beep anyways - there's no output on my 4K screen but that might well be a compatibility issue), but it will then get stuck in the Super IO Initialization stage (Qcode 99). The Q-LED for the boot device is permanently on, VGA Init went through flawlessly (I'm running without a GPU regardless, just in case). I first thought this was a shorted mainboard after a decent amount of research online, but after getting my replacement and putting the build back together I was still having the same problem (which seems unlikely with a shorted mainboard).

As for the build, this is what I'm running:

Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 2400 Mhz CL14 XMP 2.0 RAM
ASUS ROG Maximus VIII Hero
EVGA GTX 780
Intel i7 6700 (not 6700K silly Diana :P)
EVGA 600W 80+ PSU
Seagate ST1000DX001 3.5 inch 1TB Hybrid Internal Solid State Drive
her old PC's HDD (don't know the manufacturer, size, etc until I take it out of her PC again, but it's working just fine in there)

Further info I gathered while trying to fix this issue:

• Both drives are running
  
• The BIOS will initialize for quite a while before getting stuck on Q-code 99
  
• The monitor turns on with the PC, but doesn't show anything on it
  

Hopefully someone here will have an idea for further debugging steps. Cheers in advance.

[NemesisChild]

Welcome to the forum!

So you are able to post, etc. using the onboard (i7 6700) iGPU?

[Chino]

Have you tested with the GTX 780?

[GenerousGuava]

Hey you two, thanks for the quick replies. Indeed it does POST (again, according to the speaker as my monitor is black) with both the i7 built in GPU and the GTX 780. Both setups get stuck on the same issue. One thing I also failed to mention is I tried both the DVI and DisplayPort for the 780 - the mainboard doesn't support DVI so I only tested with DisplayPort. It's currently pretty late where I am, but after some suggestions from a friend I'll try both a BIOS reset (just in case, even though it seems to POST) and the monitor via HDMI tomorrow.

[Chino]

Perhaps you should check your monitor settings to make sure it's configured to use the proper port.

[GenerousGuava]

I'm currently opening it up to reset the BIOS and will test the HDMI setup later, as for your question the monitor is set to auto-detect and as I mentioned in the OP the monitor turns on with the PC and stays on while it runs - but it shows all black (with the backlight on).

[GenerousGuava]

Alright the problem is solved! I can't believe I didn't think of switching cables earlier, but it turned out to be the solution. After switching from DisplayPort to HDMI the screen started working and I was able to get into the BIOS. On another note though: the documentation I could find on the BOOT_DEVICE_LED seems to be wrong - it said it should be blinking if there's no boot device found (or in this case, the BIOS needs to be set up for the first time). Thanks for your attempts regardless, if I ever need any more help with an ROG Mainboard I'll be sure to remember the great and fast help I got here 🙂

[Chino]

GenerousGuava wrote:
Alright the problem is solved! I can't believe I didn't think of switching cables earlier, but it turned out to be the solution. After switching from DisplayPort to HDMI the screen started working and I was able to get into the BIOS. On another note though: the documentation I could find on the BOOT_DEVICE_LED seems to be wrong - it said it should be blinking if there's no boot device found (or in this case, the BIOS needs to be set up for the first time). Thanks for your attempts regardless, if I ever need any more help with an ROG Mainboard I'll be sure to remember the great and fast help I got here 🙂

The boot device QLED remains lit when the motherboard cannot find a device with an OS to boot into. 🙂

[Menthol]

Remember you don't have to have a problem with your gear to be active on the forums, sharing your experience may help inadvertently others