ASUS X670E Hero Driver / firmware bug causing big performance drop - SOLVED :)

[Biker]

Hi all,

I was recently building a new rig for a friend and noticed a huge performance hit in benchmarks when all drivers were installed.

Motherboards affected: ASUS X670E Hero / Gene (might be present on X870E variants or any Asus board with USB4).

I eliminated hardware and bios versions as a cause which left drivers.

After some sleuthing and many OS reinstalls of W10 and W11 24H2 (bug is present in both) I have found the culprit!

This is the baseline with just chipset drivers installed:

...and this is with the bugged driver installed and active:

The Culprit is the UCM driver!

Just disable this in device manager and full performance is restored

ITE USB Connector Client Device

 

[Knight47]

I usually only install chipset, audio and gpu drivers.

Does windows download this UCM driver? Cheers.

 

[Biker]

Well this is the USB driver so i'd guess pretty likely since Windows Update now tries to install everything when it feels like it unless blocked by DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller has an option to prevent Windows Update downloading and installing drivers).

 

[Knight47]

Well this is the USB driver so i'd guess pretty likely since Windows Update now tries to install everything when it feels like it unless blocked by DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller has an option to prevent Windows Update downloading and installing drivers).

Thanks. People had issues(or still have) with Intel Thunderbolt on AM5. So I'm not that surprised since above mentioned boards use Intel USB4, unlike other with Asmedia.

 

[Biker]

UPDATE + FIX

Ive just been doing more testing on the 2904 Bios (X670E Hero) and can confirm with this version of the Firmware (0004) all seems fixed now.

All drivers enabled in Device Manager and full performance

Direct download link to firmware 0004 here.

It is an .exe you can run from Windows (tested safe by me but feel free to virus scan )

I would suggest reflash this 0004 firmware version if you update your bios until they fix it fully.