Friday, May 25, 2012

ASUS P9X79 Wake on LAN (WOL)

I built a new system including an ASUS P9X79 motherboard. Wake on LAN (WOL) was just not working for me, and a setting that would enable it did not seem to exist in the BIOS (well, the EFI). There's essentially no explicit documentation on how to enable this feature in the owner's manual. Online, I found many people struggling with the same problem on older ASUS motherboards: they seemed to fix the problem by enabling the Intel LAN PXE Boot ROM (LAN PXE OPROM)---this is not necessary! The PXE ROM is for booting over the LAN, not waking in response to a magic packet. There is also a distractor called  ErP Ready which seems to enable more power features when the system is in a standby state, but also seems to be mutually exclusive of other power-on options.

The only setting you need to enable is Advanced \ APM \ Power On By PCIE/PCI. This makes sense because the Intel LAN controller is almost certainly connected as a PCIE or PCI device. I was able to wake the system from the off state using the wakeonlan program (a perl script) from MacPorts, even over WiFi.

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thankyou!! And god bless google :)

Anonymous said...

Thank you for your post Ryan.

This was successful for me.

I have been trying to wake up my computer for some time and as you point out the owners manual and sorting through the bios is difficult. Thank you for the solution.

BBF said...

Which BIOS version are you using?
After updating to 3102, and installing Win8, mine stopped working.

I had it working before when using Win7 on one of the first BIOS versions released.

Darren Milne said...

djbruno: I found the same thing with Windows 8 and BIOS 31xx and 3305.

In addition to the PCIe Wakeup that Ryan mentions, I found a second setting I had to enable in the BIOS, "Network Stack" under the "Boot" page in the BIOS settings.

Anonymous said...

didn't actually need to enable "network stack" under "boot" in UEFI/BIOS. for most I don't think this needs to be enabled, as it's loaded during the boot process, not when the computer is off and able to receive a magic packet.

Anonymous said...

For Windows 8, I had to uncheck "Turn on fast startup (recommended)" in the power settings -> "Choose what the power buttons do"
Do not ask why. But with my other settings unchanged, WOL from S5 works iff this box is unchecked.

I'm using the most recent version of BIOS/UEFI and the most recent driver for the network chipset. (Make sure to check the network device's power management tab (device manager) for appropriate settings)

Unknown said...

“Power On By PCIE/PCI” under Advanced->APM needs to be enabled and also either “Network Stack” under Advanced or under Boot->Fast Boot needs to be enabled.
Or you can just leave Network Stack disabled under Advanced and also disable Fast Boot which enables Network Stack by default under Boot->Fast Boot but you just can't see it.

So the moral of the story is that you need BOTH "Power On By PCIE/PCI" and "Network Stack" enabled.

Anonymous said...

To the anonymous poster who suggested turning off the fast boot option in Windows 8, my thanks to you. I have an Asus P9X79 Pro board with Win 8.1 and this was driving me bonkers. Tried everything in this thread in order. Once I got to your suggested and turned off the fast boot under win 8 (interestingly it was considered unavailable), WOL worked! Thank you!

Unknown said...

Brilliant post, nicely done. And thanks for mentioning all those blogs and I love them all! Cheers :)
Asus Technical Support

AlexB said...

Hi guys! Thanks all for the hints. Thought I got it working but not. When I just turn off my PC and send a wol packet it works. But after some while I send this packet again and nothing happens! This is really weird and I don't have any idea what's causing it. Any suggestions?

Anonymous said...

the reason that wol stops after having your device off for a while is likely because your modem is detecting the device has been off for a period of time and deletes it from the arp cache ... so the magic packet is not getting forwarded....u have to check your modem/router settings

fikret tursak said...

Thanks for this informative article. I had some troubles with Win 10. For example, after I upgraded it from win 8, my Wake-on-LAN does not work. I tried many things and finally I solved the problem.
Here you can find how to configure Wake-on-LAN on Windows 10.

how to configure Wake-on-LAN on Windows 10

Hope it helps for somebody else who read this article.

hevisko said...

- Bios 4608 (Latest one that works with MAcOsx 10.10 to sleep!!)
- Enable Network OPROM stuff under Advanced/Devices
- Under "Boot" Enable Network stack (FastBoot) or disable Fast Boot
=> Safe and reset.... Reboot!!!
GO back to UEFI
You should now have a network page (just two dots on the tabs to the right of the Boot/Tools tabs) showing the network adapter information, and on that page you can now enable/disbale Wake On Lan (or blink the LED :) )

Anonymous said...

i habe an p9x79 pro but its the same network chip i think. Nothing worked for me on Windows 10.
I downloaded the lässt Ethernet driver from asus and now it works