H87M PRO4 and Intel Rapid Storage (RST) not running in Win 8.1?

[TSCH]

Hello,

I just installes my brand new H87M with a G3220 with Win 8.1 x64. After installing the RST drivers and opening the program it crashes.
Want to use the drivers for power saving purposes.

What can I do now?


Mery christmas to everyone

TSCH

[parsec]

Re: H87M PRO4 and Intel Rapid Storage (RST) not running in Win 8.1?

Merry Christmas to you too!

What version of IRST are you using?

Did you install:

INF driver ver:9.4.0.1026

Intel Management Engine driver ver:9.5.14.1724

What SATA mode are you using, AHCI, RAID?

Do you have SATA Aggressive Link Power Management enabled?

[TSCH]

Re: H87M PRO4 and Intel Rapid Storage (RST) not running in Win 8.1?

Thanks a lot for your quick reply.

I did a clean reinstall of Windows 8 x64 and installed the following drivers:

IRST ver:12.8.0.1016

INF driver ver:9.4.0.1026

Intel Management Engine driver ver:9.5.14.1724



I'm using AHCI S-ATA mode.

SATA Aggressive Link Power Management is disabled.


Kind regards

TSCH

[TSCH]

Re: H87M PRO4 and Intel Rapid Storage (RST) not running in Win 8.1?

With above drivers installed IRST seems to work now, but I can't get under 18W.
I've a 300W Power Supply Enermax Triatlor and a 2.5" 1TB hdd attached to the MoBo.

Any hints/suggestions are welcome to save more power.


Kind regards

TSCH

[parsec]

Re: H87M PRO4 and Intel Rapid Storage (RST) not running in Win 8.1?

Well, 18W is very low power usage, you might not get much below that. You may have all this configured now, but to review:

Be sure that DSA (Dynamic Storage Accelerator) is enabled in the BIOS, in Storage Configuration.

In the IRST Windows software, click the Performance button. In the DSA screen, select Manual and tick the Power Saver "gear".

In the Power and Performance screen, enable Link Power Management, which needs a reboot.

In the BIOS, Advanced, CPU Configuration, set all the C-States to Enabled, including C7. Auto is not good enough, select Enabled.

Of course, no over clocking of the CPU, and enable any power saving options in the OC Tweaker screen, like SpeedStep, CPU Integrated VR Efficiency Mode, etc. If your CPU supports Offset CPU voltage, use that and select a negative offset voltage value, if your BIOS has that update, that was added to my ASR board recently. You will need to test how low you can go with a negative offset without it causing a blue screen in Windows.

Find your Windows Power Plan, and modify it with the Advanced settings. Choose anything that will use less power.

Don't forget that all the fans in your PC use power, that adds up and is hard to reduce except by not using them!

Your power supply is "only" 80+ Bronze efficiency, you would need a Gold or Platinum PSU to use less power. But at the very low power usage you have, any PSU is not very efficient at those levels, and may not make any difference. That is the reality of PC PSU's, at less than ~20% power draw, their efficiency is not very good.

[TSCH]

Re: H87M PRO4 and Intel Rapid Storage (RST) not running in Win 8.1?

@ parsec

Thanks a lot for your detailed reply.

Is there any chance of undervolting the cpu using tools (which for windows?) to find the lowest cpu/clock combination?


Kind regards

TSCH

[parsec]

Re: H87M PRO4 and Intel Rapid Storage (RST) not running in Win 8.1?

If you are using CPU power saving options now, you won't get any significant difference in CPU power usage by under volting the CPU.

To show you that, download and run this free hardware monitoring tool: HWiNFO, HWiNFO32/64 - Download

Hopefully your board's sensor chip and BIOS are good enough to provide all the data that program needs. This is an example of my Z87 system, when I was trying to get the lowest CPU power usage, since that is what Haswell CPUs should be good for:



The three columns from left to right are the Current, Minimum, and Maximum value of whatever is being measured. Note the CPU Package Power (the entire CPU) at 0.05625W at a usual Windows idle, and 0.02278W at a very low idle moment. 18W is almost 100 times the low idle power usage of the CPU, would making it 0.01W make a difference to you, or show on your meter? Don't forget the Watts shown in my picture are not the same as the AC power Watts.

To undervolt, use your board's ASRock A-Tuning utility in Windows.

I still don't know what other parts you use in your PC, but compared to the CPU power at idle, turning a fan off would save more power.