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Hi! This is my first time posting on these forums and I would like to thank everyone in advance for any help that you can provide.

My old ASUS P8Z68-V died recently after over 5 years of faithful service. The NIC and USB host controllers were both acting very strange for the past 6 months, requiring the computer to need to be restarted at least once after a cold boot for them to be recognized. Finally I thought that enough was enough and I replaced my motherboard and i7-2600K with a Gigabyte GA-Z97X-GAMING 7 and an i7-5775C (other system components are in my signature). So far I have been very happy with the performance of the new mobo and CPU, with the exception of one strange "feature".

Whenever I shutdown Windows, everything shuts down fine, but the motherboard and fans all remain powered for about 30 seconds after my monitor turns black and shuts off. This happens both during a shutdown and a restart. No errors show up and all events viewable in the Event Viewer indicate a proper shutdown that typically completes in about 12 seconds. According to Windows, everything is fine.

I've tried searching for any references to a delayed turn off on this motherboard without luck. I have also made sure that I am running the latest BIOS (ver F8), restored the optimized default settings in the BIOS and enabled ErP (as recommended by several other forums discussing different motherboards). I also double checked that both the 8 and 24 pin power cables are fully seated. None of these have had any effect, it still takes about 45 seconds total or 30 seconds after Windows fully shuts down for the motherboard to fully power down.

I never had this happen with my old ASUS board and I've never had anything happen that might raise doubt concerning my Corsair PSU in the last 5 years. Nothing else seems to be running improperly either so I am really at a loss as to why this is happening. Anyone have any experience with this motherboard or how I can disable this "feature"? I would greatly appreciate any guidance that you could provide.

Thanks!

Sounds like something at the OS level waiting on a device.  It could even be something stupid like a USB flash drive.  Try unplugging all USB devices except keyboard/mouse and see if the same thing happens.  Also check your Windows Event Logs to look for any hints.  

Hi Egg,

As I stated in my previous post, I have already looked in the event logs and nothing on the Windows side of things indicates that a shutdown takes more than about 12 to 16 seconds. Here is my last shutdown event from after I posted last night if you are wondering:

After this shutdown, the motherboard, fans and PCIe devices remained powered for another 30 seconds before they also powered down.

I also have tried removing all non-essential peripherals to see if that is a source of this issue without luck. I have removed everything but my mouse, keyboard, ethernet and display but still the problem exists. One thing to note is that all of the USB ports power down when Windows shuts down.

Therefore, since the only things that remained powered are actively cooled/cooling, it seems like this is a designed in feature to evacuate built up heat before the motherboard fully powers off. Since my PC stays quite cool, I would like to disable this behaviour if at all possible.

Try booting a live distro from a thumbdrive, and see if you get the same shutdown behavior. This will tell you whether it is something funky going on in the OS, or something inherent to the motherboard.

When you were in the BIOS, did you look through all of the power management settings to see if there was anything that sounded relevant to this issue?

I'll try booting from a live distro when I get home from work and post my results. So far I have not seen anything in the BIOS or the motherboard's manual that mentions any behaviour like I'm seeing. Then again, the arrangement of things in the BIOS is a bit different than what I was used to with my old ASUS board so I may be just missing it as well...

general_tux wrote:

Hi Egg,

As I stated in my previous post, I have already looked in the event logs and nothing on the Windows side of things indicates that a shutdown takes more than about 12 to 16 seconds.  Here is my last shutdown event from after I posted last night if you are wondering:

After this shutdown, the motherboard, fans and PCIe devices remained powered for another 30 seconds before they also powered down.

I also have tried removing all non-essential peripherals to see if that is a source of this issue without luck.  I have removed everything but my mouse, keyboard, ethernet and display but still the problem exists. One thing to note is that all of the USB ports power down when Windows shuts down.  

Therefore, since the only things that remained powered are actively cooled/cooling, it seems like this is a designed in feature to evacuate built up heat before the motherboard fully powers off.  Since my PC stays quite cool, I would like to disable this behaviour if at all possible.

Well....I can tell you that it's definitely not waiting for your CPU to cool down. 

Could be a driver for an onboard chip/device, could be something in the BIOS, or just an OS bug.  Let us know how the live distro goes, and we should be able to eliminate at least one possibility.

Nope! That is a very nice thing going from an overclocked i7-2600k @ 4.6GHz to the i7-5775C, there has been a huge reduction in the thermal load in my office. Used to be I would see CPU temps of 65C to 70C under load with both fans on the NH-D14 and now the max temp I've seen is 50C with only the center fan installed.

So after testing the system with Ubuntu it appears that the issue is motherboard related. Full power off took about a minute from the time I clicked shutdown until the computer was fully powered off. Any ideas of what to try next?

general_tux wrote:

So after testing the system with Ubuntu it appears that the issue is motherboard related.  Full power off took about a minute from the time I clicked shutdown until the computer was fully powered off.  Any ideas of what to try next?

BIOS.  Make sure it's updated to the latest version, and then go through the settings with a fine-tooth comb.

So last night I reloaded the latest BIOS firmware, reloaded optimized default settings and spent far too much time becoming familiar with Gigabyte BIOS. Nothing that I found suggested that this behavior is intentional.

After getting frustrated with that, I tried booting from a Windows installation disk and going into the system repair menu. Turns out, as soon as I clicked shutdown from that menu, the computer fully turned off without any delay! I then tried the Ubuntu disk again which again resulted in the delayed shutdown. However, I did notice a brief error message when Ubuntu was starting that there was unrecognized hardware found. I researched what this could have been and I think that the Killer E2200 NIC on the motherboard was not supported by Ubuntu. Could this have caused the delayed shutdown in Ubuntu?

Based on these results, I am guessing that the fault does lie somewhere in the OS/drivers. I will complete a new Windows 10 install tonight on a different SSD (so that I can keep my current one as a backup just in case) and see if that makes any difference. I'll let you know what I find out.

general_tux wrote:

However, I did notice a brief error message when Ubuntu was starting that there was unrecognized hardware found.  I researched what this could have been and I think that the Killer E2200 NIC on the motherboard was not supported by Ubuntu.  Could this have caused the delayed shutdown in Ubuntu

Absolutely.  I would start disabling 3rd party chips on the motherboard next, such as NICs, audio, 3rd party storage, 3rd party USB, etc.  Just for testing purposes of course.  Turn them all off to start, and if it fixes the problem, re-enable them one by one until you find the culprit.

So on my lunch break I finished installing Windows 10 onto a new SSD. Everything is working fine now, shutdowns complete in ~10 seconds and boot times are just as fast as ever. From the few error messages that were present in the event viewer (not necessarily in the 200-299 shutdown range) it appeared that a USB controller driver was causing some of the problems.

While it is annoying to reinstall everything again, I think it was probably about time. This install was updated from Windows 7 to 8 to 8.1 to 10 and I'm sure there was still some legacy junk left behind each time that evaded my cleanup, mostly since everything was working great and I didn't want to put into the effort.

I'm still going to see if I can find a linux distro that plays nicely with the Killer NIC just to have it around. I have typically just used a VM when I needed linux for a hobby project but it never hurts to have a good live distro in the toolbox. Anyone have any suggestions of known distros that play nicely with this NIC?

You could try installing the linux driver, if it works make your USB with persistance and it will save the driver for next use.

I was going to say that's very likely a confused Fastboot issue.

Turn off fastboot in power options or in admin cmd shell: "powercfg -h off" (turns off hibernate, whose file is shared for fastboot, use "powercfg -h -type reduced" to turn just fastboot back on)
Reboot. wait a minute for everything to start up, than reboot again and than turn back on.

I gave up on it all after having to cycle it a few times over the year. Been running with no fastboot and realize system is plenty fast with SSD.

Why should i have it do some weird complicated save dance, id rather get a truly fresh boot every time. Well worth a few seconds.

Glad the clean install fixed the issue. My suggestion for new clean install is to always turn off fastboot and pagefile(virtual memory) to un-complicate the OS and keep it that way.

solo_clipper wrote:

You could try installing the linux driver, if it works make your USB with persistance and it will save the driver for next use.

I'll have to look into a linux driver for the Killer NIC. All I have found so far is that linux support is pretty poor compared to Intel's NICs.

blahsaysblah wrote:

I was going to say that's very likely a confused Fastboot issue.

Turn off fastboot in power options or in admin cmd shell: "powercfg -h off" (turns off hibernate, whose file is shared for fastboot, use "powercfg -h -type reduced" to turn just fastboot back on)
Reboot. wait a minute for everything to start up, than reboot again and than turn back on.

I gave up on it all after having to cycle it a few times over the year. Been running with no fastboot and realize system is plenty fast with SSD.

Why should i have it do some weird complicated save dance, id rather get a truly fresh boot every time. Well worth a few seconds.

Glad the clean install fixed the issue. My suggestion for new clean install is to always turn off fastboot and pagefile(virtual memory) to un-complicate the OS and keep it that way.

Thanks for the suggestions. I actually already turn off hibernation and fastboot since the SSD makes the boot fast enough already. My old boot SSD was only 120GB so I started running into space issues which is originally why I disabled fastboot and I didn't miss it. Also with 32BG of RAM, I typically disable the pagefile as well. Sometimes I will temporarily specify a 4 to 8 GB page file (never the 1.5x the system RAM that Windows wants) but this is only when I start running into issues loading very large or complex assemblies in SolidWorks.

Hi, I'm also currently facing the same issues and in addition, I've realized my system software also practically couldn't open it will show like its loading but I see nothing happening after waiting for more than 15mins. The weird part is afterward I tried to factory erase my entire computer, it was so slow at loading to the confirmation menu, once it was able to erase the system it took extremely long as well and when it finally booted back in the system, it didn't clear anything.
I'm guessing it's the motherboard issue. My motherboard is ASUS Z87-PLUS

HeyUser wrote:

Hi, I'm also currently facing the same issues and in addition, I've realized my system software also practically couldn't open it will show like its loading but I see nothing happening after waiting for more than 15mins. The weird part is afterward I tried to factory erase my entire computer, it was so slow at loading to the confirmation menu, once it was able to erase the system it took extremely long as well and when it finally booted back in the system, it didn't clear anything.
I'm guessing it's the motherboard issue. My motherboard is ASUS Z87-PLUS

I must say it's a coincidence, even I have the same issue with ASUS laptop