Is your Gigabyte motherboard rebooting when idle? This is what to do...

I had a problem with my new Intel based system rebooting when the machine was idle for a while. I had a heck of a time troubleshooting it, but I did find a solution.

It seems that there is a bug in the older BIOS offerings from Gigabyte that causes the PC to reboot when idle. I checked my BIOS availability as a last resort, and it showed a new release with a tag that says:



I updated the BIOS and no more reboots when idling.

So, tl;dr, the answer to the strange rebooting problem is to upgrade the BIOS to the most recent version. I don't know how many motherboards are affected by this, but it definitely applies to the Z790 UD AC. It does not apply to the Z790 AORUS Elite AX that I have in my office at work (I checked).

There ya go.

My Gigabyte boards weren't rebooting, but they were eating the Raptor Lake processors unless you did an upgrade of the BIOS! Apparently there was a voltage control issue and they were overheating bits of the processor and actually killing them over time!

gunrunnerjohn said:

My Gigabyte boards weren't rebooting, but they were eating the Raptor Lake processors unless you did an upgrade of the BIOS! Apparently there was a voltage control issue and they were overheating bits of the processor and actually killing them over time!

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Yeah, that's a problem too. You have to have the BIOS with the microcode that prevents that. It gets expensive after a while.

The only issue I have with my Z890 Gigabyte board is sometimes when I do a shutdown, about 30 seconds later the system will boot back up. This forces me to hit the PS switch when I need the PC to stay shutdown. Still haven't figured out the issue yet, and this was before and after a new BIOS update. System specs listed below.

Dru2 said:

The only issue I have with my Z890 Gigabyte board is sometimes when I do a shutdown, about 30 seconds later the system will boot back up. This forces me to hit the PS switch when I need the PC to stay shutdown. Still haven't figured out the issue yet, and this was before and after a new BIOS update. System specs listed below.

Click to expand...

I had that issue happening with my Win10 machine a few years ago, it was LAN activity. I disabled all the WOL functionality and it stopped happening. Not sure exactly why it was happening, but that fixed it.

Dru2 said:

The only issue I have with my Z890 Gigabyte board is sometimes when I do a shutdown, about 30 seconds later the system will boot back up. This forces me to hit the PS switch when I need the PC to stay shutdown. Still haven't figured out the issue yet, and this was before and after a new BIOS update. System specs listed below.

Click to expand...

The wake on lan is usually the problem for me. Mine sometimes does the same thing. I have to be careful because it seems that every time I do a driver update for my Ethernet, it sets the wake on lan to on again. Then I have to wonder why my PC reboots so soon after shutdown, until I remember that little fact. It's kind of embarrassing, TBH.

The odd part of WOL is it should only wake when receiving a Magic Packet addressed to your computer's MAC address. That shouldn't happen unless someone really meant to wake you. OTOH, I did see a setting that also wakes the computer based on any LAN activity, one would think that would preclude sleep at all, there's always LAN activity on my network!

Yeah. Not checking "Allow this device to wake the computer" in the Power tab of your network properties seems to be the way to go. That's what keeps getting reset on my PC with new drivers.

gunrunnerjohn said:

I had that issue happening with my Win10 machine a few years ago, it was LAN activity. I disabled all the WOL functionality and it stopped happening. Not sure exactly why it was happening, but that fixed it.

Click to expand...

Catnip said:

The wake on lan is usually the problem for me. Mine sometimes does the same thing. I have to be careful because it seems that every time I do a driver update for my Ethernet, it sets the wake on lan to on again. Then I have to wonder why my PC reboots so soon after shutdown, until I remember that little fact. It's kind of embarrassing, TBH.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestions but I don't have Wake On Lan configured, so that's not the issue.