I can confirm rear I/O panel USB works fine on my B450, but case headers don't for all devices. Examples of things that don't work are USB receiver for keyboard and mouse, or multiple devices plugged into USB 3.0 at the front panel. No such issues with the 3770k/Z77 system it replaced on the same case headers. It's very strange for sure. No such issues with two B550 setups I have around the house.
I have no problems with my x570 Aorus Master, with my 5700XT running @ PCIe4--and my boot NVMe drive in PCIe4 mode, as well. No problems with USB 2.0 & up or PCIe cards (I use several USB devices). I've read several posts, however, written by people with RTX-3k nVidia GPUs that don't run correctly in PCIe4 mode--they hog the bus and any PCIe cards--like sound cards--won't run with the nVidia GPU set to 4.0--but everything is fine when dialing the bandwidth back to PCIe 3.0 for the GPU in which the amount of bandwidth allocated the GPU is regulated to spec by the motherboard. Looks very much like bus contention and PCIe bandwidth hogging by the nVidia GPUs, apparently.
It's very interesting as this is an issue I've not seen since the old, ancient PCI bus was in common use--it was common in those days to see bus contention between the GPU and PCI sound cards--you'd get a lot popping, crackling, and sometimes, the sound card wouldn't run at all. I am surprised to see a return of this issue. It has nothing to do with AMD, AFAIK and as far as I can see--since I don't have the problems and have been running my GPU at PCIe4 for the past 17 or more months without these problems.
Misdiagnoses of the causes of PC-build problems is common today, unfortunately.
I hope this is only a driver problem for nVidia as it will be easy to fix. Let's hope it isn't an electrical problem with the RTX-3k cards.
The problem you refer to of crackling sound was specific to Creative Labs based cards, and it was due to their unwillingness to follow the PCI spec for resource access. Motherboard manufacturers had to add logic to their BIOS implementations to identify CL cards and make certain they did not interfere with other devices on the shared bus to work around it.
I worked on ACPI for Microsoft at the time and it was a major headache that CL did not have any interest in solving. I do not miss them.
It really was not. The 'fix' was literally to reserve the channels the CL card insisted on using against spec just for those cards. As mentioned, board manufacturers had to have specific detection logic in the BIOS to handle the cards, and that included Intel based boards as well. Non-CL sound cards had no issue on Via based boards.
The VIA chipsets had issues with IRQ sharing and other issues that caused the crackling. There were patches and workarounds that fixed that, but it took quite a while until they appeared. It literally didnt matter what kind of soundcard you used!
What's funny is how there were crappy VIA chipsets and really bulletproof ones. For example, the KT133 was garbage, but KT133A was great. KT266 was a disaster, but KT266A was fantastic. The issue was if you didn't know ahead of time, you could end up with a headache... thankfully driver updates MOSTLY resolved the issues on systems I had the displeasure of working on for family and friends.
Despite often being called a 'bus' PCIe is not a bus: It's a series of discrete point-to-point links. If a device on the PCIe link from the CPU (to the GPU) is supposedly causing issues with a different device on a different PCIe link from the chipset (to the sound card) then there is some management problem with the chipset or CPU, or a physical signal issue. A driver update for the device hung off the CPU can at best mitigate the impacts of the underlying issue.
Sorry, but this is not right. A bus is NOT a communication channel where more than two devices can communicate. USB is a bus (hence its name) even if it strictly point to point. And SPI (much older) is too, even though you have to manually select which device is hearing the master keeping the other ones deaf. Memory communication paths are a bus, even if they connect a single chip to a single memory controller (strictly single point-to-point bus).
Said that, there can be lots of reasons why what should be transmissions on two separated bus can interfere each other. One of them is controller resource sharing, and another is badly design signal paths (even internally the IC). Others can be devices that are at the limit of their sensibility (bandwidth capacity) and too many communication ongoing on the controller may lower the voltages making signal degrade the small amount needed for loosing their capacity to bring a meaningful information to the other end of the bus (yes, it is a bus even if it point-to-point). There can be issues with higher clocks (PCI3 and PCI4 interfering with slower clocks).
What is sure is that this kind of problem should have been left in the past. But is seems they are not, and this may give an idea why in all AMD's quarterly reports there has always been that division (the chipset one) that has always had a minus in front of the revenue value: maybe the chipset department is not up to the rest of the company. And one may ask if with the quality of that department (which is not only HW but also SW related) the company can really become a reliable alternative to Intel domination.
Minor point of contention regarding the "chipset department": B550 isn't an AMD chipset. X570 is. If seemingly random system configs across both chipsets and multiple generations of Zen are having issues, its likely the board designs. Given the recent BIOS tweaks I've seen from Gigabyte regarding USB stability, I'd lean towards that theory.
I thought I was outside the scope because I'm on a B450 also, with a 2600, but I've had some issues with USB3, too. The USB-C 3.2 gen 1 10 GB/s port on my ASRock board won't recognize when my Plugable NVMe enclosure is even connected, so I have to swap cables (it came with both USB-C and -A cables)and use the USB-A cable instead, on a slower port. The C port works okay with other stuff, though. On the other hand, my laptop with Intel inside can see and use the drive fine over its TB3/USB-C port. And when I check it with CrystalDiskInfo it shows incremented unexpected power loss numbers on the NVME stick inside from the desktop connections. And I think I'm at the latest UEFI revision my desktop board will support while still supporting my 2600. So the enclosure sits unused for now.
I wonder if a powered hub would resolve that. Not saying you should, just wondering aloud. Side note, this is why more motherboards should use larger BIOS ROM chips... you can get a combo BIOS with the latest tweaks, even if the CPU microcode loaded is the same. It's a lot more common among 500 series boards, my board has a 32MB ROM.
I personally experienced it on B550 board from Gigabyte and ryzen 3xxx (Win 10 PCIe 3.0). At first USB 2.0 controler got crushed totally that I had to go to device menager and scan for hardware changes to get it back and it actually happened couple times in couple months. With the updated bios stating "improved USB stability" it doesn't get crushed any more but it had some stalls. It happens when their's lot of activity and while pushing it (gaming). But this is only related to USB 2.0 controllers the 3.1 ones work correctly. Personally I believe it's related to side control protocol bus used (think it's i2c) which gets overflown.
Update; it's early to say for sure but it seems USB 2.0 problems ware solved with latest (still beta) bios stating "AMD AGESA ComboV2 1.2.0.0, Improve USB 2.0 compatibility". Update resetts everything including higher profiles for MB and GPU so needles to say it whose unpleasant.
I've had tons of USB connectivity problems on my B550M / 3600XT in linux. I was blaming hubs / static, but now I'm not so sure... Interesting, thanks for the article!
Funny as I have USB switch (switch between work laptop and desktop ) that causes my Comet lake platform to Blue screen all the time. . Its the second USB switch I have tried. Static sometimes causes it as well. I guess I should get out my Bulky KVM switch as those seem better designed but all I want to do is switch between platforms with the push of a button. USB issues aren't only an AMD thing. THats likely the issue with Universal standards that we keep modifying.
This is bad news, I wanted to get new HW but lack of stock is a hell. This is another whole can of worms, I wanted to install Win7 which is possible on some boards but now with this. I'm really not confident on what's going with this type of problems.
I will wait for the solution or an explanation alongside waiting for Intel 11gen Rocket Lake.
I have the same basic problem with intermittent USB connectivity under heavy load on my Z68 system with a Core i5 2500k. In my case the Etron USB 3.0 controllers are fine under light to moderate load, but will have disconnects when connected to my VR headset (HTC Vive) or when doing extremely large (hundreds of gigabytes or more) backups to external hard drives.
I worked around it by buying a Vantec USB 3.1 PCI Express card that uses an ASMedia controller, and that has been super solid. For anyone else running into this issue on a desktop, I'd recommend the add-on card route as a way to get reliable USB connectivity quickly.
If you can move to Z75 or Z77 (or any subsequent chipset), you will be able to use the USB host controller from the chipset without issue. Intel's USB host controllers have been consistently stable for VR, whereas all third party host controllers (including the ASMedia ones used for all chipsets other than X570) are liable to issues: disabling them when present (even on an Intel system) will resolve connectivity issues for VR without the need to add any additional controllers (and adding controllers without disabling the problematic ones may not resolve any issues). Not a great situation if X570 is having problems too. It does make sense somewhat: the X570 die is a Matisse (Zen 2) IO die fabricated on a larger process and with the memory controllers disabled. At that point, AMD were still licensing chipset features from ASMedia so may well have been licensing their USB controllers too.
The VR USB issue is not one of bandwidth, as commonly believed, but more a 'buffer bloat' like situation where a dodgy controller if present will demand the OS wait for it to finish processing (even when not actually having anything to process) as the designs were optimised for peak sustained read/write speeds for high bandwidth devices ('lookit how fast my USB SSD runs!') or for very low bandwidth operation (mice, keyboards, single webcams) at more reasonable latencies. When faced with moderate bandwidth tasks that also demand low latency, they are caught in the middle and expect a constant flood of data rather than bursts that need to arrive with low latency. Host controller starts a big chunky buffer expecting a big pile of data, then fills up a little bit of it and subsequently twiddles its thumbs waiting for 'the rest' that never arrives before timing out and passing that buffer along.
The lack of "expected" data is not a problem on any (well designed) device. USB endpoints can stall as they need before sending the required data and the problem is only at the high level where maybe one would expect a sound or video streams that is however interrupted. To manage that there are different kinds of data transmission provided with USB like isochronous, bulk or interrupt. But at low level there must not be any disconnection issues due to this "lack od data" (and one may wonder why an SSD or VR device would not have data to send when they are working).
I once had USB dropout issues on my Pentium 4 system, the external HDD didn't perform consistently while I swung it around my head by the USB cable. Thought you all should hear about it.
These issues may be related to there being a difference between USB ports that are supported directly by the CPU, and others that use another USB controller for additional ports. So, individual motherboards with various configurations may be the problem, taking PCIe lanes that are shared, vs. those which get the dedicated CPU PCIe lanes.
The following link shows the differences, and how CPU based ports may not have a problem while chipset connected ports may have problems:
It may be also that they know their chipset has a faulty USB/PCIe management and they cannot solve it by SW. These chipsets are almost one year old now considering the time they had simulated and tested them before going on mass market motherboards and still being in the process to ask for help to the unlucky users to understand what's wrong is not a good signal that they can do anything to fix it for real.
They probably rushed to the PCI4 marketing band wagon too soon.
I have an Asus ROG Crosshair VI Hero with Ryzen 3900X(upgraded from the 1800X I had started with), and have not had any of these issues. Obviously, PCIe 4.0 isn't supported on first generation Ryzen motherboards.
No issues with any of the B550 systems I've built over the last 6-7 months. Time will tell I guess. Every board I've used was Asus, for what its worth. This could be a component (or batch of components) issue among one or many OEM's, who knows at this point. But what is interesting is no issues seem to be reported with retail systems, like those from Lenovo, HP, etc, indicating this could very well be a motherboard component issue, not a chipset\firmware issue.
an Embarrassing way to screw out, USB is old standard, and while AMD busy fixing their ancient 2.0 and slightly newer 3.1 Port, Their competitor already perfecting Thunderbolt, even contributing it's technology to USB Forum
"The fact that users are now having USB issues begs the question whether the issues have been present all along but are now rising above the noise, or there is something related to the longevity of these systems."
Pretty sure it's the former. My system has been doing weird things with USB devices since I got it, but it took a while to narrow it down to the motherboard/CPU.
While having all kind of monitoring (temperatures, fan speeds, power supply) on new mainboards, there's almost none supporting USB related current (power) and voltages (because of qc >4.0 or USB-PD <=100W?) monitoring?
I'm using a 3700x CPU, x570 motherboard and a X5700XT GPU and if I allow the GPU to use PCIe4.0 I run into all sorts of issues.
Doesn't seem limited to USB either. A Sound Blaster as well as a EVGA sound card had constant audio dropouts while GPU was allowed to use PCIe 4.0. Also experienced 1-2 bluescreens per month with seemingly random causes.
Haven't had many issues since forcing the GPU to use PCIe 3.0 but feels like the stability is quite fragile, one of the recent GPU drivers caused some of the audio issues to reappear in some games. I traced the issue to in-game settings related to a bordeless fullscreen option.
Another person using the exact same hardware with a NVidia PCIe 3.0 GPU hasn't had any problems, I'd switch my own GPU too but sadly not many exist on the market right now.
Amazing, every comment section about this is PACKED with comments of people who have had the same problems for ages. Yet every time when you ask about issues with AMD because you know they always had such issues in the past... crickets... and even attacks because you dared to question AMDs quality.
But just to put things more in (future) perspective... Aren't X570 and B550 the first chipsets made directly by AMD after year of (working) chipsets designed by ASMedia? It may be that they have not so much expertise with all those high frequency lines and protocols after year of development outsourcing.
I've got an Intel 10th gen with a wired usb c connection to my Oculus Quest. The connection is pretty good most of the time but it freaks out during next level loads on HL Alyx. It is a terrible vomit inducing experience. The system typically recovers after the load but not always.
Curiously this load screen issue has been fixed by eliminating the the usb c cable in favor of Virtual Desktop using a wired cat 6 on the PC and wonderful cordless wifi freedom on the headset end. I'm thrilled that the wireless works better than expected and better than with the cord.
There must be some competition for resources between the ssd and usb connection.
Well this sounds totally familiar, doesn't it? Oh how I loved my Athlon products with their shi**y AssMedia or VIA chipsets. Always USB and SATA issues, slow performance, blue screens, compatibility issues. Switching to Intel and never had any of those issues anymore with an Intel Chipset. 99% sure it is the crappy AsMedia Chipset and their crappy drivers. Was always a reason why I never buying AMD products again if they wont get rid of AsMedia.
Intel chipsets are usually pretty solid but so were the Nvidia nForce chipsets when the Athlon was a better proposition than the Pentium 4... Shame you bought the cheap board.
Asmedia is owned by Asus, and I have a very hard time believing they didn't know of this issue before now. There has been countless post in Asus' forum regarding USB issues, the B550-E posts about USB 2.0 issues alone should have been sufficient to raise the alarm.
That is an interesting problem. This does not seem to be the case for B350 systems. I have an older B350 system and never had any issues with USB. The only issue i had after a windows 10 feature update somewhere around november 2019, was PCIe power saving being enabled in windows10 power managament and this caused random crashes. Also USB power savings are enabled by default under windows 10 for AMD systems. I disabled that as well as i have no need for that just to be sure and because some people experienced weird usb disconnects and this was adivsed. Maybe people who have issues now should check for the powersavings in windows 10 and turn it off with respect to PCIe and USB. Perhaps that will solve all the problems people experience with the 300, 400 and 500 series chipsets. Just type control or go to the system32 folder for control.exe and open control panel. from there go to the power options. Then go to advanced and search for PCIe pwoer management and USB power management and set it to disabled. After a restart, see if that helps.
So basically sounds like AMD drew out the process to run people out of their return period. Can't believe this is still an issue on boards as of January 2022...
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
45 Comments
Back to Article
haukionkannel - Monday, February 22, 2021 - link
One user did report that iCUE program did cause these issues... another that Pci4 did cause these so yeah... not an easy task.akramargmail - Monday, February 22, 2021 - link
Can confirm on my B450 and Ryzen 2600X. USB2 works fine, USB3 keeps disconnecting USB sticks and disks.Golgatha777 - Monday, February 22, 2021 - link
I can confirm rear I/O panel USB works fine on my B450, but case headers don't for all devices. Examples of things that don't work are USB receiver for keyboard and mouse, or multiple devices plugged into USB 3.0 at the front panel. No such issues with the 3770k/Z77 system it replaced on the same case headers. It's very strange for sure. No such issues with two B550 setups I have around the house.WaltC - Monday, February 22, 2021 - link
I have no problems with my x570 Aorus Master, with my 5700XT running @ PCIe4--and my boot NVMe drive in PCIe4 mode, as well. No problems with USB 2.0 & up or PCIe cards (I use several USB devices). I've read several posts, however, written by people with RTX-3k nVidia GPUs that don't run correctly in PCIe4 mode--they hog the bus and any PCIe cards--like sound cards--won't run with the nVidia GPU set to 4.0--but everything is fine when dialing the bandwidth back to PCIe 3.0 for the GPU in which the amount of bandwidth allocated the GPU is regulated to spec by the motherboard. Looks very much like bus contention and PCIe bandwidth hogging by the nVidia GPUs, apparently.It's very interesting as this is an issue I've not seen since the old, ancient PCI bus was in common use--it was common in those days to see bus contention between the GPU and PCI sound cards--you'd get a lot popping, crackling, and sometimes, the sound card wouldn't run at all. I am surprised to see a return of this issue. It has nothing to do with AMD, AFAIK and as far as I can see--since I don't have the problems and have been running my GPU at PCIe4 for the past 17 or more months without these problems.
Misdiagnoses of the causes of PC-build problems is common today, unfortunately.
I hope this is only a driver problem for nVidia as it will be easy to fix. Let's hope it isn't an electrical problem with the RTX-3k cards.
Reflex - Monday, February 22, 2021 - link
The problem you refer to of crackling sound was specific to Creative Labs based cards, and it was due to their unwillingness to follow the PCI spec for resource access. Motherboard manufacturers had to add logic to their BIOS implementations to identify CL cards and make certain they did not interfere with other devices on the shared bus to work around it.I worked on ACPI for Microsoft at the time and it was a major headache that CL did not have any interest in solving. I do not miss them.
Beaver M. - Tuesday, February 23, 2021 - link
Nah, that was the crappy VIA chipset that caused that.Reflex - Tuesday, February 23, 2021 - link
It really was not. The 'fix' was literally to reserve the channels the CL card insisted on using against spec just for those cards. As mentioned, board manufacturers had to have specific detection logic in the BIOS to handle the cards, and that included Intel based boards as well. Non-CL sound cards had no issue on Via based boards.Beaver M. - Wednesday, February 24, 2021 - link
The VIA chipsets had issues with IRQ sharing and other issues that caused the crackling. There were patches and workarounds that fixed that, but it took quite a while until they appeared. It literally didnt matter what kind of soundcard you used!maffle - Wednesday, February 24, 2021 - link
agree. I remember having the issues with my crappy VIA KT133 or how it was named.Alexvrb - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
What's funny is how there were crappy VIA chipsets and really bulletproof ones. For example, the KT133 was garbage, but KT133A was great. KT266 was a disaster, but KT266A was fantastic. The issue was if you didn't know ahead of time, you could end up with a headache... thankfully driver updates MOSTLY resolved the issues on systems I had the displeasure of working on for family and friends.edzieba - Tuesday, February 23, 2021 - link
Despite often being called a 'bus' PCIe is not a bus: It's a series of discrete point-to-point links. If a device on the PCIe link from the CPU (to the GPU) is supposedly causing issues with a different device on a different PCIe link from the chipset (to the sound card) then there is some management problem with the chipset or CPU, or a physical signal issue. A driver update for the device hung off the CPU can at best mitigate the impacts of the underlying issue.CiccioB - Tuesday, February 23, 2021 - link
Sorry, but this is not right.A bus is NOT a communication channel where more than two devices can communicate.
USB is a bus (hence its name) even if it strictly point to point. And SPI (much older) is too, even though you have to manually select which device is hearing the master keeping the other ones deaf. Memory communication paths are a bus, even if they connect a single chip to a single memory controller (strictly single point-to-point bus).
Said that, there can be lots of reasons why what should be transmissions on two separated bus can interfere each other. One of them is controller resource sharing, and another is badly design signal paths (even internally the IC). Others can be devices that are at the limit of their sensibility (bandwidth capacity) and too many communication ongoing on the controller may lower the voltages making signal degrade the small amount needed for loosing their capacity to bring a meaningful information to the other end of the bus (yes, it is a bus even if it point-to-point).
There can be issues with higher clocks (PCI3 and PCI4 interfering with slower clocks).
What is sure is that this kind of problem should have been left in the past.
But is seems they are not, and this may give an idea why in all AMD's quarterly reports there has always been that division (the chipset one) that has always had a minus in front of the revenue value: maybe the chipset department is not up to the rest of the company.
And one may ask if with the quality of that department (which is not only HW but also SW related) the company can really become a reliable alternative to Intel domination.
Alexvrb - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Minor point of contention regarding the "chipset department": B550 isn't an AMD chipset. X570 is. If seemingly random system configs across both chipsets and multiple generations of Zen are having issues, its likely the board designs. Given the recent BIOS tweaks I've seen from Gigabyte regarding USB stability, I'd lean towards that theory.artifex - Wednesday, February 24, 2021 - link
I thought I was outside the scope because I'm on a B450 also, with a 2600, but I've had some issues with USB3, too. The USB-C 3.2 gen 1 10 GB/s port on my ASRock board won't recognize when my Plugable NVMe enclosure is even connected, so I have to swap cables (it came with both USB-C and -A cables)and use the USB-A cable instead, on a slower port. The C port works okay with other stuff, though. On the other hand, my laptop with Intel inside can see and use the drive fine over its TB3/USB-C port. And when I check it with CrystalDiskInfo it shows incremented unexpected power loss numbers on the NVME stick inside from the desktop connections. And I think I'm at the latest UEFI revision my desktop board will support while still supporting my 2600. So the enclosure sits unused for now.Alexvrb - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
I wonder if a powered hub would resolve that. Not saying you should, just wondering aloud. Side note, this is why more motherboards should use larger BIOS ROM chips... you can get a combo BIOS with the latest tweaks, even if the CPU microcode loaded is the same. It's a lot more common among 500 series boards, my board has a 32MB ROM.ZolaIII - Monday, February 22, 2021 - link
I personally experienced it on B550 board from Gigabyte and ryzen 3xxx (Win 10 PCIe 3.0).At first USB 2.0 controler got crushed totally that I had to go to device menager and scan for hardware changes to get it back and it actually happened couple times in couple months. With the updated bios stating "improved USB stability" it doesn't get crushed any more but it had some stalls. It happens when their's lot of activity and while pushing it (gaming). But this is only related to USB 2.0 controllers the 3.1 ones work correctly.
Personally I believe it's related to side control protocol bus used (think it's i2c) which gets overflown.
ZolaIII - Thursday, February 25, 2021 - link
Update; it's early to say for sure but it seems USB 2.0 problems ware solved with latest (still beta) bios stating "AMD AGESA ComboV2 1.2.0.0,Improve USB 2.0 compatibility". Update resetts everything including higher profiles for MB and GPU so needles to say it whose unpleasant.
Alexvrb - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Yeah I'm not updating until the non-beta is out, don't want to redo my settings twice.jcward - Monday, February 22, 2021 - link
I've had tons of USB connectivity problems on my B550M / 3600XT in linux. I was blaming hubs / static, but now I'm not so sure... Interesting, thanks for the article!cyrusfox - Monday, February 22, 2021 - link
Funny as I have USB switch (switch between work laptop and desktop ) that causes my Comet lake platform to Blue screen all the time. . Its the second USB switch I have tried. Static sometimes causes it as well. I guess I should get out my Bulky KVM switch as those seem better designed but all I want to do is switch between platforms with the push of a button. USB issues aren't only an AMD thing. THats likely the issue with Universal standards that we keep modifying.Silver5urfer - Monday, February 22, 2021 - link
This is bad news, I wanted to get new HW but lack of stock is a hell. This is another whole can of worms, I wanted to install Win7 which is possible on some boards but now with this. I'm really not confident on what's going with this type of problems.I will wait for the solution or an explanation alongside waiting for Intel 11gen Rocket Lake.
duploxxx - Tuesday, February 23, 2021 - link
pathetic is the only worth valid for you commentAlexvrb - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
Win7, are you serious? GL with that.IBM760XL - Monday, February 22, 2021 - link
I have the same basic problem with intermittent USB connectivity under heavy load on my Z68 system with a Core i5 2500k. In my case the Etron USB 3.0 controllers are fine under light to moderate load, but will have disconnects when connected to my VR headset (HTC Vive) or when doing extremely large (hundreds of gigabytes or more) backups to external hard drives.I worked around it by buying a Vantec USB 3.1 PCI Express card that uses an ASMedia controller, and that has been super solid. For anyone else running into this issue on a desktop, I'd recommend the add-on card route as a way to get reliable USB connectivity quickly.
edzieba - Tuesday, February 23, 2021 - link
If you can move to Z75 or Z77 (or any subsequent chipset), you will be able to use the USB host controller from the chipset without issue. Intel's USB host controllers have been consistently stable for VR, whereas all third party host controllers (including the ASMedia ones used for all chipsets other than X570) are liable to issues: disabling them when present (even on an Intel system) will resolve connectivity issues for VR without the need to add any additional controllers (and adding controllers without disabling the problematic ones may not resolve any issues). Not a great situation if X570 is having problems too. It does make sense somewhat: the X570 die is a Matisse (Zen 2) IO die fabricated on a larger process and with the memory controllers disabled. At that point, AMD were still licensing chipset features from ASMedia so may well have been licensing their USB controllers too.The VR USB issue is not one of bandwidth, as commonly believed, but more a 'buffer bloat' like situation where a dodgy controller if present will demand the OS wait for it to finish processing (even when not actually having anything to process) as the designs were optimised for peak sustained read/write speeds for high bandwidth devices ('lookit how fast my USB SSD runs!') or for very low bandwidth operation (mice, keyboards, single webcams) at more reasonable latencies. When faced with moderate bandwidth tasks that also demand low latency, they are caught in the middle and expect a constant flood of data rather than bursts that need to arrive with low latency. Host controller starts a big chunky buffer expecting a big pile of data, then fills up a little bit of it and subsequently twiddles its thumbs waiting for 'the rest' that never arrives before timing out and passing that buffer along.
CiccioB - Tuesday, February 23, 2021 - link
The lack of "expected" data is not a problem on any (well designed) device.USB endpoints can stall as they need before sending the required data and the problem is only at the high level where maybe one would expect a sound or video streams that is however interrupted. To manage that there are different kinds of data transmission provided with USB like isochronous, bulk or interrupt.
But at low level there must not be any disconnection issues due to this "lack od data" (and one may wonder why an SSD or VR device would not have data to send when they are working).
kliend - Monday, February 22, 2021 - link
I had 0 issues related to this, but my motherboard did eat an m.2 drive. Asus x570 tuf wifiBushLin - Monday, February 22, 2021 - link
I once had USB dropout issues on my Pentium 4 system, the external HDD didn't perform consistently while I swung it around my head by the USB cable. Thought you all should hear about it.Targon - Monday, February 22, 2021 - link
These issues may be related to there being a difference between USB ports that are supported directly by the CPU, and others that use another USB controller for additional ports. So, individual motherboards with various configurations may be the problem, taking PCIe lanes that are shared, vs. those which get the dedicated CPU PCIe lanes.The following link shows the differences, and how CPU based ports may not have a problem while chipset connected ports may have problems:
https://www.quora.com/How-many-PCIE-lanes-does-Ryz...
AMD may be aware that the issue is chipset related for example, but wants to verify by checking the motherboard topologies of those affected.
CiccioB - Tuesday, February 23, 2021 - link
It may be also that they know their chipset has a faulty USB/PCIe management and they cannot solve it by SW. These chipsets are almost one year old now considering the time they had simulated and tested them before going on mass market motherboards and still being in the process to ask for help to the unlucky users to understand what's wrong is not a good signal that they can do anything to fix it for real.They probably rushed to the PCI4 marketing band wagon too soon.
Targon - Monday, February 22, 2021 - link
I have an Asus ROG Crosshair VI Hero with Ryzen 3900X(upgraded from the 1800X I had started with), and have not had any of these issues. Obviously, PCIe 4.0 isn't supported on first generation Ryzen motherboards.Samus - Monday, February 22, 2021 - link
No issues with any of the B550 systems I've built over the last 6-7 months. Time will tell I guess. Every board I've used was Asus, for what its worth. This could be a component (or batch of components) issue among one or many OEM's, who knows at this point. But what is interesting is no issues seem to be reported with retail systems, like those from Lenovo, HP, etc, indicating this could very well be a motherboard component issue, not a chipset\firmware issue.heickelrrx - Tuesday, February 23, 2021 - link
an Embarrassing way to screw out, USB is old standard, and while AMD busy fixing their ancient 2.0 and slightly newer 3.1 Port, Their competitor already perfecting Thunderbolt, even contributing it's technology to USB ForumQA please QA QA QA
Gigaplex - Tuesday, February 23, 2021 - link
"The fact that users are now having USB issues begs the question whether the issues have been present all along but are now rising above the noise, or there is something related to the longevity of these systems."Pretty sure it's the former. My system has been doing weird things with USB devices since I got it, but it took a while to narrow it down to the motherboard/CPU.
back2future - Tuesday, February 23, 2021 - link
While having all kind of monitoring (temperatures, fan speeds, power supply) on new mainboards, there's almost none supporting USB related current (power) and voltages (because of qc >4.0 or USB-PD <=100W?) monitoring?Eredu - Tuesday, February 23, 2021 - link
I'm using a 3700x CPU, x570 motherboard and a X5700XT GPU and if I allow the GPU to use PCIe4.0 I run into all sorts of issues.Doesn't seem limited to USB either. A Sound Blaster as well as a EVGA sound card had constant audio dropouts while GPU was allowed to use PCIe 4.0. Also experienced 1-2 bluescreens per month with seemingly random causes.
Haven't had many issues since forcing the GPU to use PCIe 3.0 but feels like the stability is quite fragile, one of the recent GPU drivers caused some of the audio issues to reappear in some games. I traced the issue to in-game settings related to a bordeless fullscreen option.
Another person using the exact same hardware with a NVidia PCIe 3.0 GPU hasn't had any problems, I'd switch my own GPU too but sadly not many exist on the market right now.
Beaver M. - Tuesday, February 23, 2021 - link
Amazing, every comment section about this is PACKED with comments of people who have had the same problems for ages.Yet every time when you ask about issues with AMD because you know they always had such issues in the past... crickets... and even attacks because you dared to question AMDs quality.
CiccioB - Tuesday, February 23, 2021 - link
But just to put things more in (future) perspective...Aren't X570 and B550 the first chipsets made directly by AMD after year of (working) chipsets designed by ASMedia?
It may be that they have not so much expertise with all those high frequency lines and protocols after year of development outsourcing.
lakedude - Wednesday, February 24, 2021 - link
I've got an Intel 10th gen with a wired usb c connection to my Oculus Quest. The connection is pretty good most of the time but it freaks out during next level loads on HL Alyx. It is a terrible vomit inducing experience. The system typically recovers after the load but not always.Curiously this load screen issue has been fixed by eliminating the the usb c cable in favor of Virtual Desktop using a wired cat 6 on the PC and wonderful cordless wifi freedom on the headset end. I'm thrilled that the wireless works better than expected and better than with the cord.
There must be some competition for resources between the ssd and usb connection.
maffle - Wednesday, February 24, 2021 - link
Well this sounds totally familiar, doesn't it? Oh how I loved my Athlon products with their shi**y AssMedia or VIA chipsets. Always USB and SATA issues, slow performance, blue screens, compatibility issues. Switching to Intel and never had any of those issues anymore with an Intel Chipset. 99% sure it is the crappy AsMedia Chipset and their crappy drivers. Was always a reason why I never buying AMD products again if they wont get rid of AsMedia.BushLin - Thursday, February 25, 2021 - link
Intel chipsets are usually pretty solid but so were the Nvidia nForce chipsets when the Athlon was a better proposition than the Pentium 4... Shame you bought the cheap board.Martin84a - Sunday, February 28, 2021 - link
Asmedia is owned by Asus, and I have a very hard time believing they didn't know of this issue before now. There has been countless post in Asus' forum regarding USB issues, the B550-E posts about USB 2.0 issues alone should have been sufficient to raise the alarm.WilliamZ12345 - Tuesday, March 2, 2021 - link
That is an interesting problem. This does not seem to be the case for B350 systems. I have an older B350 system and never had any issues with USB. The only issue i had after a windows 10 feature update somewhere around november 2019, was PCIe power saving being enabled in windows10 power managament and this caused random crashes. Also USB power savings are enabled by default under windows 10 for AMD systems. I disabled that as well as i have no need for that just to be sure and because some people experienced weird usb disconnects and this was adivsed. Maybe people who have issues now should check for the powersavings in windows 10 and turn it off with respect to PCIe and USB. Perhaps that will solve all the problems people experience with the 300, 400 and 500 series chipsets. Just type control or go to the system32 folder for control.exe and open control panel. from there go to the power options. Then go to advanced and search for PCIe pwoer management and USB power management and set it to disabled. After a restart, see if that helps.crod712 - Thursday, January 6, 2022 - link
A year later after these comments and the platform still struggles with the same issues.crod712 - Thursday, January 6, 2022 - link
So basically sounds like AMD drew out the process to run people out of their return period. Can't believe this is still an issue on boards as of January 2022...