Zenith Extreme Alpha Hard Shutdown

[areese159]

I am having issues with my new zenith extreme alpha where the computer will hard shutdown unexpectedly. After shutting down the motherboard will continue to glow but pressing the start button on the motherboard or the front of the case has no effect. To get the computer to restart you have to either pull the atx power connector or toggle the power supply. This has happened a hand full of times now and has only happened when the computer was at idle. Temps are sitting around 32 C so it does not appear to be an overheating issue. Power supply also appears to be outputting correct voltages with the 12v rail sitting at 12.088 volts on average according to HWINFO64. Also should mention this power supply was in previous build without issues and is 1200w which is plenty for my build, kinda of a little overkill :p. Nothing in the system is overclocked due to the instability, as such everything is at stock values. Computer will sometimes run for 24 hours without issues, and other times will hard shutdown back to back. I would greatly appreciate any advice anyone has because at this point I'm kinda of stuck.

Build Info:
Zenith Extreme Alpha
ThreadRipper 2920x
Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 32GB DDR4
GIGABYTE AORUS GeForce RTX 2080
Corsair HXi 1200w
970 Evo 1TB
WB Blue 1TB

[Silent_Scone]

I would consider removing the system from the chassis and testing. Make sure AUX and 24 pin power connectors are fully in place at both ends.

[dejanh]

I have been stress testing my ZEA build since last night (about 16 hours now) and I did not run into the issue you describe. You may have a grounding fault as noted above. So far this board appears to work much better than the ZE I had in my system until yesterday. I hope that with UEFI improvements it continues to mature well.

[areese159]

Thank you for the quick responses, ill try and disassemble the pc tonight and get it running outside of the case. I'll post back after I have it running outside the case for a couple hours.

[Cory29]

"only happened when the computer was at idle"

are you sure your computer isnt going into sleep mode and getting stuck - the zenith had this issue since day one only the last 3 bios has it seemed to be fixed

[areese159]

When it first started happening I thought the exact same thing with it being a sleep issue but then I ran into numerous occasions where I would stop using my computer for couple of minutes and it would hard shutdown in front of me.

[gupsterg]

The other thing that comes to my mind is do you have any RGB/Fan control SW, System monitoring tools, etc running in the background.

The ZEA uses the same Super IO chip as other ASUS AM4/sTR4 mobos, this IC has an issue where when multiple apps access it and or use incorrect method of accessing it there can be erratic board/fan headers issues. This issue was fixed on ZE/C6H/C7H with an implementation in UEFI and SW. You can check if UEFI has implementation by seeing if in HWINFO sensors page you see heading with ASUS WMI.

[dejanh]

gupsterg wrote:
The other thing that comes to my mind is do you have any RGB/Fan control SW, System monitoring tools, etc running in the background.

The ZEA uses the same Super IO chip as other ASUS AM4/sTR4 mobos, this IC has an issue where when multiple apps access it and or use incorrect method of accessing it there can be erratic board/fan headers issues. This issue was fixed on ZE/C6H/C7H with an implementation in UEFI and SW. You can check if UEFI has implementation by seeing if in HWINFO sensors page you see heading with ASUS WMI.

It's using ASUS WMI. I checked on my ZEA board.

[areese159]

Wanted to post an update, got the build out of the case and realized I didn't have enough spare soft tubing to re-plumb the loop so it had to go back in the case while I ordered some more off of amazon. Taking the system out, putting it back in and verifying all the connections were correct has not fixed the issue. I have also experienced the hard shutdowns outside of the PC being idle now. This happened to me yesterday and now today, once while gaming and the other time while coding. Both times I noticed that fan expert stopped responding and fans were stuck at their base speeds and with a couple of minutes the PC hard shutdown. This was not due to temps as I was looking at the temperature on LiveDash and they were at 42 C. Does this still sound in line with a grounding issue, or fan expert just some outlier?

[gupsterg]

dejanh wrote:
It's using ASUS WMI. I checked on my ZEA board.

Nice to know.

areese159 wrote:
Wanted to post an update, got the build out of the case and realized I didn't have enough spare soft tubing to re-plumb the loop so it had to go back in the case while I ordered some more off of amazon. Taking the system out, putting it back in and verifying all the connections were correct has not fixed the issue. I have also experienced the hard shutdowns outside of the PC being idle now. This happened to me yesterday and now today, once while gaming and the other time while coding. Both times I noticed that fan expert stopped responding and fans were stuck at their base speeds and with a couple of minutes the PC hard shutdown. This was not due to temps as I was looking at the temperature on LiveDash and they were at 42 C. Does this still sound in line with a grounding issue, or fan expert just some outlier?

I would try removing Fan Expert, LiveDash and any other things like Aura, Ai Suite. Anything related to RGB control via OS, allowing changes to say fan profiles, able to show monitoring data from board, etc in OS. Even if it is not SW for ASUS, but even Corsair, etc.

As stated in previous post the ASUS WMI fix works on SIO by having it in UEFI and SW using the method to access SIO. Some boards/setups seem to be more susceptible to issues, others less.

I would try above diagnostic process just to rule it out.