Diagnosing wake from sleep failures

dph · 26 May 2025 at 13:25

I built a new system early last year, and was plagued with failures to wake from sleep. If EXPO was enabled with any profile at all, it would consistently fail to wake with a memory power initialisation failure, but on cold boot it was fine, and entirely stable in use and under memtest loads. This was under multiple BIOS revisions.

Without EXPO enabled, it generally wakes from sleep ok, but fails in the same way maybe in 1 in 20 times. Since the cold boot on current motherboard chipsets are abysmally slow (the MSI MEG was over 3 minutes, even tweaked), I just put up with having EXPO disabled, and running RAM at slower speeds - the faster startup was far more important to me. I assumed it was a memory/motherboard compatibility issue (although the timings were supported on the motherboard, the *exact* model wasn't) No huge deal, just irritating.

Initially, the build was

Code:

MSI MEG X670E ACE
CORSAIR DOMINATOR PLATINUM CL30 (CMT64GX5M2B6000Z30)
AMD 7950X3D
Gigabyte AORUS RTX4090
beQuiet Dark Power 13 1000W Titanium

A couple of months ago, I decided to swap motherboards again, and also swapped out the RAM (fractionally different, but officially supported on the board), the build is now

Code:

ASUS ROG STRIX X870-E
CORSAIR DOMINATOR TITANIUM CL30 (CMP64GX5M2B6000Z30)
AMD 7950X3D
Gigabyte AORUS RTX4090
beQuiet Dark Power 13 1000W Titanium

What's curious, and infuriating, is that this updated build STILL exhibits the same effect (different BIOS error code, naturally, it's now an ASUS code "11", rather than the MSI "A6"), but the same issue with failing to boot from sleep if EXPO is enabled in any way (I've tried a whole range of different profiles and speeds, all the same effect).

So it's either the CPU or the PSU. I wouldn't consider the PSU, execpt it's something to do with power according to the BIOS info.

So, any of you experienced situations like this and have any ideas how to resolve it?

wookiee87 · 26 May 2025 at 13:51

fast start-up defiantly wont help with waking from sleep, have you tried expo enabled but fast start-up disabled to see if it works or has the same issue?

Tetras · 26 May 2025 at 14:14

dph said:
So it's either the CPU or the PSU. I wouldn't consider the PSU, execpt it's something to do with power according to the BIOS info.

So, any of you experienced situations like this and have any ideas how to resolve it?

I wouldn't want to say it is 100% your hardware. Recovery from sleep has always been a bit hit and miss. These boards are still immature in some ways.

dph · 26 May 2025 at 14:57

wookiee87 said:
fast start-up defiantly wont help with waking from sleep, have you tried expo enabled but fast start-up disabled to see if it works or has the same issue?

I tried everything from vanilla BIOS settings, to tweaked (i.e. fast boot, MCR, powerdown etc.) That didn't affect this behaviour, just the boot time when dealing with cold boots.

dph · 26 May 2025 at 15:02

Tetras said:
I wouldn't want to say it is 100% your hardware. Recovery from sleep has always been a bit hit and miss. These boards are still immature in some ways.

yep, true enough ... I just find the same behaviour across two motherboards with at least half a dozen BIOS versions between them to be a bit suspect. There are definite moans about similar things in the MSI forums, but not widespread enough to indicate a general problem, and I've yet to see reports in the ASUS ones

Tetras · 26 May 2025 at 15:08

dph said:
yep, true enough ... I just find the same behaviour across two motherboards with at least half a dozen BIOS versions between them to be a bit suspect. There are definite moans about similar things in the MSI forums, but not widespread enough to indicate a general problem, and I've yet to see reports in the ASUS ones

I've seen reports of issues with Asus boards too and also boot problems related to Armory crate, with the "monitoring software workaround" toggle fixing it. There's some level of weirdness with expo, memory context restore and power down too, some are able to use all three, whereas other boards are unstable and get BSODs 'n such.

wookiee87 · 26 May 2025 at 15:14

i know there were wonky issues with nvidia drivers causing weird wake from sleep issues, forcing the user to hard reset as a fix, not sure if they have been fixed or not.

do you not ever power down to flush the memory buffers, aka give windows a clean start?

wookiee87 · 26 May 2025 at 16:35

My setup runs totally fine, i have fast start-up enabled, memory context restore/memory dividers set 1:1, expo too, crate installed and working, only difference is i never put my pc into sleep mode

dph · 26 May 2025 at 18:04

wookiee87 said:
My setup runs totally fine, i have fast start-up enabled, memory context restore/memory dividers set 1:1, expo too, crate installed and working, only difference is i never put my pc into sleep mode

Mine will also run fine in the same setup - but I won't sacrifice the boot time for it

On a vanilla BIOS, my 670 board was well over three minutes to boot, and my 870 a little less. But regardless of what tuning can be done to the BIOS startup, it doesn't compare to a sub 5 second wake from sleep.

I do a full restart probably monthly, or whenever else Windows deems it necessary, and that's plenty for me

wookiee87 · 26 May 2025 at 22:05

dph said:
Mine will also run fine in the same setup - but I won't sacrifice the boot time for it On a vanilla BIOS, my 670 board was well over three minutes to boot, and my 870 a little less. But regardless of what tuning can be done to the BIOS startup, it doesn't compare to a sub 5 second wake from sleep.

I do a full restart probably monthly, or whenever else Windows deems it necessary, and that's plenty for me

there are a couple of settings that need to be enabled to allow post time to take seconds vs a minute or 2, when i power up windows is loaded within 10 seconds everytime, be at work until late afternoon but can help if no one offers assistance in the mean time.

sg0 · 27 May 2025 at 06:47

Would adjusting any C state controls help?

Farore · 28 May 2025 at 16:43

Which OS are you running?

dph · 29 May 2025 at 10:13

sg0 said:
Would adjusting any C state controls help?

My understanding is that C-states don't really affect anything during sleep, it's more run-time operation. Not really an area I have much experience with though

dph · 29 May 2025 at 10:14

Farore said:
Which OS are you running?

Win11Pro

Dg834man · 29 May 2025 at 10:53

My old x58 system did this with a slightly unstable overclock gave a few settings some more millivolts and the problem went away, seems inline with your first post.

jigger · 29 May 2025 at 11:09

I have a few machines that I boot windows on and don’t have any issue waking from sleep. Those are running Win Ent LTSB/C tho and non use MSI boards. Asus, Gigabyte and ASrock.

It could possibly be windows build dependent. Maybe try burning an ISO of the latest version.

dph · 29 May 2025 at 11:56

Dg834man said:
My old x58 system did this with a slightly unstable overclock gave a few settings some more millivolts and the problem went away, seems inline with your first post.

interesting, this sounds like a likely path, I'll poke around. thanks

dph · 29 May 2025 at 11:58

jigger said:
I have a few machines that I boot windows on and don’t have any issue waking from sleep. Those are running Win Ent LTSB/C tho and non use MSI boards. Asus, Gigabyte and ASrock.

It could possibly be windows build dependent. Maybe try burning an ISO of the latest version.

it's unlikely to be OS related, it's a BIOS level failure which prevents POST (and this is also on an ASUS board)

jigger · 29 May 2025 at 12:22

dph said:
it's unlikely to be OS related, it's a BIOS level failure which prevents POST (and this is also on an ASUS board)

I’ve not come across any issue with wake either from sleep or LAN so to me that points to an issue elsewhere. My Asus board is on its original BIOS so maybe, but the others have had updates so maybe not. All my systems use the same windows build though.