P67 Power Management Issues

i.e. P67 (SandyBridge) chipset will NOT resume from sleep mode!

I purchased a MSI P67A-GD65 B3 motherboard with an Intel i7-2600k a few weeks ago and returned the motherboard as it would go to sleep and not resume without a hard power reset (it also froze twice while working, so that was a deciding factor on the return).

I replaced it with an Asus P8P67 Pro.  It has been having many of the same issues when trying to resume from sleep mode:

• Short ‘sleep’ sessions allow the PC to return to normal; generally under 1 hour
• Extended (4+ hour) sessions will not resume.  Often my USB mouse will be dark and light up briefly when I press a button or move; but no wakey-up.
• Pressing the power button on the system does nothing
• My two options are to press reset or do a hard power off; after which the system comes back with with an unexpected shutdown alert.

Reading various forums (search for ‘P67 sleep mode issues’ and you get 1mil+ results) there are numerous suggestions:

1. Disable PLL Overvoltage (specific to the Asus board); did this with no difference
2. Issues with SSD drives and sleep mode; replaced the SSD with a SATA3 Winchester drive (and rebuilt Windows 7 from scratch) with no difference
3. BIOS update will resolve; latest BIOS and no difference
4. Issues with Win7 SP1 and Marvell SATA (SCSI MiniPort) controller Hotfix; Applied and possibly a difference?
5. Use MCE Standby Tool; Installed tray icon, but does not appear to prevent sleep mode
6. Disabled (as far as I can ascertain) ALL sleep, hibernate and hybrid sleep modes; still goes to sleep and having sleep issues!
   powercfg –h off
7. Clear BIOS configuration after firmware update and reset to defaults; haven’t tied this one yet.

Today I was able to get my first successful wake from hibernation (albeit hibernation was disabled).  I pressed the mouse button on my PC and I heard the HDs click and the system fans spin up.  From powercfg I was able to discern:

powercfg -lastwake
Wake History Count - 1
Wake History [0]
  Wake Source Count - 1
  Wake Source [0]
    Type: Device
    Instance Path: PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_1503&SUBSYS_849C1043&REV_05\3&11583659&0&C8
    Friendly Name:
    Description: Intel(R) 82579V Gigabit Network Connection
    Manufacturer: Intel

This is logged as my first wake since I built this system about a week ago- not noting the 10 hard resets I have had to perform since then.

I am not sure if this was from the hotfix or from MCE Standby Tool running before it went into hibernation (or Hybrid sleep?).

I guess I will try the BIOS reset.  If that doesn’t work I will go back to Win7 with no SP1 and see what happens…

Arrgh!