[SOLVED] ASUS ROG Maximus XI Hero - how to disable anti-surge?

[rootsrat]

Hey all. I have recently purchased Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming OC card and I suffer from the common problem of my PC resetting itself when under load.

First of all, my full specs:

Spoiler: Specs

• MOBO - Asus ROG Maximus XI Hero (Wi-Fi) CODBO4 Edition
• PSU - BeQuiet 850 W Dark Pro 11 (Gold)CPU - Intel Core i7 9700K @ 4.90 GHz
• COOLING - Corsair Hydro 100i RGB Platinum
• RAM - 32GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3200MH
• GFX - Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3080 Gaming OC

All of the drivers are up to date, including BIOS.

I have so far tried the following:

• Limiting the power target on the card and underclocking it. While it works, it does not allow me to play more complex games, as it resets itself even when at 65%, so the safe value for me is 50% and 1700 MHz on the clock (default is 1800).
• Running the PSU in single rail mode with the OC Key.
• Re-plugging the 2x 8-pin (which are both 6+2) to the GFX card, so currently it's on 2 separate cables (1x 8pin from each cable is connected to the GFX card)

Sadly nothing works, it keeps rebooting itself. The next thing I would like to try is to turn off ASUS' anti-surge protection on the mobo, but for the love of me I can't find it in the BIOS settings. Reading these 3 manuals didn't bring me any answers... Man1 Man2 Man3

Can anyone advise how can I disable the anti-surge protection on this mobo? Thanks!

BTW, I have ordered a new PSU, it's should arrive sometime next week, however if I can somehow use my current one, I'd rather not spent any more money.

 

[g-unit1111]

I really can't see any scenario in which disabling the anti-surge protection on your motherboard would be beneficial. If anything, actually doing this would be reckless and ill-advised, and you're likely to fry your whole system as a result. It's there for a reason.

It's most likely your PSU. A 3080 is a very power hungry GPU and it needs a strong and solid stream of power delivered to it. Your PSU is decent but it could be better. But you need a solid and well built PSU like a Seasonic Prime or Corsair HXi. I use an HXi 850 with my 3080 and it works fine. It was a bit on the pricier side but it's one of the better PSUs you can get.

If it's not the PSU then it's most likely your GPU and then that would probably need to be RMA'd. You might want to setup a support ticket with Gigabyte to see what they say.

 

[Karadjgne]

What exactly does 'pc resetting itself' mean? There's a rather marked difference between a game crashing to desktop (CTD), bluescreen or black screen errors ans rebooting.

'Running the PSU in single rail mode with the OC Key.' I've never heard of that, ever. A rail is a circuit, never heard of changing a multi-circuit psu into a single circuit voltage output before, a psu is either built with multiple circuits using lower rated components to split the initial flow through of power up before joining a combined bus, or it's a single rail with larger components that can handle the entire load by itself.

You'd only need to disable the Asus anti-surge if you get an actual message stating that the anti-surge has detected out of spec power limits and the anti-surge kicked in to protect the motherboard.

The beQuiet Dark series is the better built series, usually extremely good, but consider you have a 9700k with OC? that can push 200w stock, a rtx3080 that can spike 500w and another 100w± for the rest of the pc, a 650w psu is going to be drastically overwhelmed and Asus anti-surge isn't going to do anything (enabled or disabled), for transient spikes overdrawing the psu and killing power to the cpu EPS.

Good psu for sure, but it has its own protections and lower limits than your pc can ostensibly hit.

A Good 750w is usually a Minimum recommended psu for a higher end 3080 pc.

 

[rootsrat]

Thanks for the advice all.

I really can't see any scenario in which disabling the anti-surge protection on your motherboard would be beneficial. If anything, actually doing this would be reckless and ill-advised, and you're likely to fry your whole system as a result. It's there for a reason.

It's most likely your PSU. A 3080 is a very power hungry GPU and it needs a strong and solid stream of power delivered to it. Your PSU is decent but it could be better. But you need a solid and well built PSU like a Seasonic Prime or Corsair HXi. I use an HXi 850 with my 3080 and it works fine. It was a bit on the pricier side but it's one of the better PSUs you can get.

If it's not the PSU then it's most likely your GPU and then that would probably need to be RMA'd. You might want to setup a support ticket with Gigabyte to see what they say.

What exactly does 'pc resetting itself' mean? There's a rather marked difference between a game crashing to desktop (CTD), bluescreen or black screen errors ans rebooting.

'Running the PSU in single rail mode with the OC Key.' I've never heard of that, ever. A rail is a circuit, never heard of changing a multi-circuit psu into a single circuit voltage output before, a psu is either built with multiple circuits using lower rated components to split the initial flow through of power up before joining a combined bus, or it's a single rail with larger components that can handle the entire load by itself.

You'd only need to disable the Asus anti-surge if you get an actual message stating that the anti-surge has detected out of spec power limits and the anti-surge kicked in to protect the motherboard.

The beQuiet Dark series is the better built series, usually extremely good, but consider you have a 9700k with OC? that can push 200w stock, a rtx3080 that can spike 500w and another 100w± for the rest of the pc, a 650w psu is going to be drastically overwhelmed and Asus anti-surge isn't going to do anything (enabled or disabled), for transient spikes overdrawing the psu and killing power to the cpu EPS.

Good psu for sure, but it has its own protections and lower limits than your pc can ostensibly hit.

A Good 750w is usually a Minimum recommended psu for a higher end 3080 pc.

I have purchased this particular PSU. Do you think it's good enough? I've heard people claiming EVGA's G+ specific series can handle the spikes that 30 seriues produce, but they are not available anywhere. Corsair HXi 1000 W was my 2nd choice actually, but I went with the BQ one...

As for the OC Key - this is from one of the reviews:

be quiet! also supply an ‘overclocking key’ allowing the end user switch between the default four rail setting, to a single 12V rail mode.

It's a switch that is plugged in to the PSU.

For the record, I have measure the power use and the total Wattage registered in the meter that sits between the PSU power cable and the electric socket (it's plugged into the socket and the PC is plugged into the meter)- shows 384 Watts total power use in most stressful situations. There should be plenty of headroom, even considering the power spikes. That led me to conclusion that it may be ASUS' anti-surge protection kicking in, rather than the PSU.

The symptoms are that power to the PC is suddenly cut out, as if someone pulled the plug. The PC then turns itself back on and reboots to Windows. It happens roughly around 25-35 minutes after the GPU is under load (I tested this on some newer games like Cyberpunk and also by stress test in OCCT.)

This is a common problem with RTX 30 series cards, plenty of threads in the internet about this. In most cases installing a better PSU solves the issue - but I was under the impression that my PSU is a very good one. Granted I've had it for a few good years now... so it may have deteriorated.

Also, the monitoring does not show anything abnormal, no spikes, no sudden voltage changes etc. I can attach some logs from GPU-Z, but honestly they don't show anything abnormal. But I do realise it only takes reading every 1 second, so it may be not good enough to cath the anomaly, if it's exists.

 

[Karadjgne]

Ah. That. It's a 4 rail psu. Normally you'd see all 4 rails tied together in a single bus so almost all multi rail psus draw from all the rails simultaneously, that allows for smaller components to be used in parallel to make a 'virtual' single rail. There are an odd few quads that have individual outputs, dedicated cpu, pcie, pcie, motherboard rails and are almost always different amperage ratings.

What beQuiet did was take a quad and slap a switch on the output so you get either 4 individual rails with dedicated overcurrent protections for the 4 outputs, or you get a parallel setup where all the rails combine and the OCP combines, when using a particular oversized cpu or gpu power draw.

For your purposes, you'd set the psu for combined single rail so if either the cpu or gpu pulls extensive amounts, spike or otherwise, then the draw doesn't trip the OCP of the individual rail.

It's a sales gimmick, BeQuiet could have just left out that switch and left the psu as a regular multi-rail psu. For a gaming psu, there's no benefit and only drawbacks for seperate rail outputs.

Run msi Kombuster and Prime95 small fft (no AVX) simultaneously. That'll give the pc a kick in the pants load on gpu and cpu. Use HWInfo (not HwMonitor) sensors only and take a close look at temps, especially the gpu. The 3080 has several temp probes that can report, besides the single 'gpu' temp of the processor itself.

Also, if using Chrome, make sure Hardware Acceleration is disabled.

 

[rootsrat]

To post an update, I purchased Corsair HX 1000i PSU and this has fixed the problem for me completely.

 

[g-unit1111]

To post an update, I purchased Corsair HX 1000i PSU and this has fixed the problem for me completely.

I have the 850W version of that same unit, that is an excellent choice.