↓Skip to main content
Amar’s Blog
  1. Blog/

Troubleshooting USB Issues on AM4 Platform

·400 words·2 mins

USB Issues on AM4
#

My main desktop carries a AMD Ryzen 9 5950x on a B550 motherboard with 128GB DDR4 RAM. It is a very powerful yet efficient machine and really quiet with air cooling. I really enjoy the power behind it. Everything I throw at it from VMs to Deep learning, Video editing to multi threaded image processing scripts, It handles them very well.

My main problem at the start of the was platform instability. Second problem was the stuttering when the CPU idles and then comes back to load. This leads to bad feeling.

The Problem
#

  • Random disconnects
  • Having issues when doing IO operations, crashing of windows explorer.
  • USB devices disappearing.
  • USB 3.0 vs 2.0 behavior differences

Initial Troubleshooting
#

  • I did some bios updates and have the latest chipset updates
  • PCI-e gen 4 to 3 switching as per some threads on reddit.
  • USB suspend settings in windows.

What Actually Worked
#

It was very painful trying out different advice, modifying the settings and dealing with resets/unresponsive PC. Finally, I managed to make it work. The trick is keeping the CPU frequency locked at all times. This comes at a cost of higher power consumption. Changing the CPU core voltage override usage from auto reduced my power consumption by around 30W from 130 to 98w. My final settings:

  • CPU core Ratio at 40 which is constant 4Ghz.
  • CPU core voltage override 1.025.
  • Slight over volt on the CPU SOC Voltage.
  • I went back to PCI-e gen 4.
  • The PC has no problems going into sleep.

Lessons Learned
#

  • The micro stutters that happen with idle frequency to load disappeared as a side effect since I set the CPU to constant frequency.
  • Most of these USB issues seem to have never been solved and effect x570 and X470.
  • These issues seems to effect even AM5 platform from some reddit threads.
  • I really don’t care for peak performance. Platform stability and IO are far more important.

Preference for future hardware
#

  • With this experience and my AMD laptop from 2022 that does not recover from sleep and had to reset every time, I might skip AMD in favor for a little lower performance, lower efficiency and higher platform stability with Intel.

Update May 2025: The motherboard underwent a reset after a bios update and the USB issues came back. Going back to the above settings fixed the issues.