Hi all,

I recently upgraded my machine to an ASUS B650E-F (Running Win10). I have some Trident Z RGB installed to it, as well as one 12V RGB strip and one 5V ARGB connected to the headers on the board. After making the mistake of installing Armory Crate and realizing that it just sets every device to one color, I installed OpenRGB in hopes of having a little bit more granularity.

It gets a little fuzzy here, but at some point with both programs installed, my board stopped getting detected by any RGB software altogether, the lights on the board and the ARG went black, and the 12V RGB is just stuck on green. The RAM is still detected and addressable, however.

I’ve tried every remedial action I can think of (BIOS reflashes, CMOS battery removal+clears, Windows reinstalls, updating any and all drivers, messing around with disabiling/ enabling Aura in BIOS and changing ErP settings, and many, many reinstalls of Aura Sync/Armory Crate/openRGB) and I’ve come up empty.

My one lead is the log from openRGB below:

[Trace:] [ResourceManager] Calling detection progress callbacks. [Debug:] [ENE (ASUS Aura) SMBus Controller] Bus 03 is a motherboard and the subvendor matches the one for ASUS, looking for a device at 0x40 [Debug:] [ENE SMBus] looking for devices at 0x40… [Debug:] [ENE (ASUS Aura) SMBus Controller] Bus 03 is a motherboard and the subvendor matches the one for ASUS, looking for a device at 0x4E [Debug:] [ENE SMBus] looking for devices at 0x4E… [Debug:] [ENE (ASUS Aura) SMBus Controller] Bus 03 is a motherboard and the subvendor matches the one for ASUS, looking for a device at 0x4F [Debug:] [ENE SMBus] looking for devices at 0x4F… [Debug:] [ENE (ASUS Aura) SMBus Controller] Bus 04 is a motherboard and the subvendor matches the one for ASUS, looking for a device at 0x40 [Debug:] [ENE SMBus] looking for devices at 0x40… [Debug:] [ENE (ASUS Aura) SMBus Controller] Bus 04 is a motherboard and the subvendor matches the one for ASUS, looking for a device at 0x4E [Debug:] [ENE SMBus] looking for devices at 0x4E… [Debug:] [ENE (ASUS Aura) SMBus Controller] Bus 04 is a motherboard and the subvendor matches the one for ASUS, looking for a device at 0x4F [Debug:] [ENE SMBus] looking for devices at 0x4F… [Debug:] [ASUS Aura SMBus Motherboard] no devices found [Trace:] [ASUS Aura SMBus Motherboard] detection end

I’m very code-illiterate, so this is where I turn to help. I assume this means that something is borked with my boards firmware? Do I have any options outside of RMA? By board is well within warranty, but I’d really prefer not to.

Thanks in advance for any insight.

  • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.mlMEnglish
    2·
    10 months ago

    The newer ASUS Aura motherboards use a USB chip for RGB. If you look at the list of USB devices you should see an ASUS device. There is a Get Hardware IDs button in the OpenRGB settings you can use to view this. If the USB device doesn’t show up then there is a firmware issue. It is a bad idea to run multiple RGB software at the same time, at least multiple RGB software that tries to access the same device, as the conflicts from two things trying to talk at once can mess things up.

    The RAM RGB is controlled by SMBus.

    • AMemeFrom06@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      Thanks for the reply and the insight. There’s no ASUS USB device from the looks of it, so it sounds like a firmware issue indeed then. I’ve tried looking before, but I can’t find any first-party solution from ASUS to update LED firmware. Am I pretty much SOL you think?

      • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.mlMEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        The only option I can think of is to reflash the chip with a debugger tool. We had an issue with bricked MSI RGB chips and those used an ARM microcontroller from Nuvoton. I was able to connect to it with a Nuvoton Nu-Link debugging tool using a header on the board, dump the flash memory, and found what looked to be a configuration section using a hex editor. I reset that area to all 0xFF (erased state of flash memory) and reflashed my modified firmware using the debugger. It recovered the RGB. I have not heard of bricking issues related to ASUS boards before this though while it was unfortunately common on MSI boards.

        • AMemeFrom06@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          I have stumbled on a few of those old MSI threads, sounds like it was a nightmare. Thanks for the suggestion though, I’ll look in to the Nu-Link tool . It might be a bit above my technical competence but I’m up for a challenge, this is really eating away at me haha.

          I must just be one of the lucky ones then. I’ve read people having similar issues with ASUS boards for years, but there doesn’t seem to be any real common threads outside of just the general symptoms.