RT8065ZQW Replacement (ASUS) and Management Engine

[Uazzamerican]

Hello,
thank you for this forum and to share your experience.
It helped me a lot.
One of the things I learned is that a dead motherboard could be fixed by changing RT8065ZQW IC (or it's equivalent), depending on symptoms.

On a Z97 Pro, this replacement was enough to make the board boot and work, but I see N/A on ME version.
It is not a minor issue as ME and it's spi portion is responsible for other things, such as cpu microcodes.

It seems that the eeprom is not able to correctly communicate with PCH.
Already changed eeprom chip and I did all troubleshooting I could with my external programmer.

Any suggestions?

[DynaxSC]

If the SPI chip wouldn't communicate with PCH, the board would not even start to POST. If there is no ME version or it is 0.0.0.0 the bios image has been probably messed up, probably overwritten a stock bios image and made no backup of the original BIOS. PCH must be somewhat "paired" with a new ME, now this "pairing" is lost. You must now initialize the ME on the PCH. There are some posts on this forum how to do this, look for them.

[Uazzamerican]

If the SPI chip wouldn't communicate with PCH, the board would not even start to POST. If there is no ME version or it is 0.0.0.0 the bios image has been probably messed up, probably overwritten a stock bios image and made no backup of the original BIOS. PCH must be somewhat "paired" with a new ME, now this "pairing" is lost. You must now initialize the ME on the PCH. There are some posts on this forum how to do this, look for them.

The image does contain the ME version, but as you said, the eeprom does not talk with the PCH.
I tried a lot of commands to initialise the ME with no luck at all.
The most complete guide is this one:
https://winraid.level1techs.com/t/gu...lization/31277

And here there is the author of th guide that try to help in a similar situation.
https://winraid.level1techs.com/t/in...ializing/35001

I am in the same boat, no command works.

Other routes?