GA-Z77-D3H bluescreen on sleep in AHCI mode

[Jong]

Hi. New here and to Gigabyte motherboards  

Overall I am very happy with my new board. However, as usual with a new system there are a few issues and the subject of this thread is the biggest.

First system specs:

GA-Z77-D3H
i5 3570K @3.4Ghz
2x4GB Kingston Hyperx RAM
OCZ Vertex4 128GB SSD connected by 6Gb/s SATA
3xexternal HDD cneected by USB 3.0
AMD 5750 GPU
Windows 7 Pro x64

BIOS set to optimised default settings.
I have tried with both F14 and F15e BIOS.
I have updated all drivers with the latest from your web site.

Sleep works fine in IDE mode (I.e. absolute default settings). However, if I set SATA mode to AHCI the F14 BIOS almost always bluescreens on trying to wake. Sometimes it will get to display the Windows desktop, then bluescreen. Mostly it bluescreens earlier in the wakeup. Interestingly with the F15e the behaviour is different. Mostly it fails to wake from sleep, but then successfully resumes from the Hybrid Sleep hibernation file. However, sometimes it simply "hangs". No bluescreen, but nodisplay whatsoever and the VFD on the fron of my case is also hung suggesting it is not just the display driver but the whole PC that is frozen. Only a hard reset will fix this state.

If I turn off sleep and instead hibernate the PC reliably wakes.

This is totally predicatable. I can toggle between AHCI mode and IDE mode. IDE mode sleeps perfectly, AHCI mode does not.

Any thoughts? Thanks.

[Jong]

Found a workaround to my own problem.

I have set up Intel Rapid Start, using Gigabytes EZSetup utility. It does something like hibernate when you put the PC to sleep - writes the RAM to SSD, requires absolutely no power - but brings the PC back to desktop in a few secs, bypassing the 25-30 secs BIOS screen you normally see when returning from hibernation. Once set up you can disable hibernate mode in W7, thus removing the hiberfil.sys, so it takes no more space on your SSD than W7 "out of the box", with hibernate enabled.

Only downsides are:

- It needs and SSD
- You do need to be prepared to allocate space on the SSD the size of your system memory. If you normally disable W7 hibernation mode/hybrid sleep this will not work for you.

Other than that it is REALLY quick to resume AND saves power and seems to get around my problem with resuming from regular W7 sleep 

[Jong]

Edit: OK. I take it back! I am now back using hibernate again:

1. The PC has crashed on restore once. It seems to be rare, unlike the problems with sleep, but hibernate is 100% reliable.
2. Wake-on-LAN does not work in this powered down state. It does work in W7 hibernate mode.
3. Although this gets you very swiftly to the desktop, the PC takes some time to rediscover plug and play devices, like a remote control, keyboard mouse, external drives. You here numerous system sounds of devices being added. It takes just about as long for the system to be fully ready  as it does using the regular W7 hibernate mode. Maybe a little quicker, but not much.

All in all, after some brief excitement it does not seem to either be a totally effective workaround for my issue or much better than using W7 hibernate.

I would still like to understand why sleep works reliably in IDE mode, but not in AHCI mode. This clearly should not be the case.