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I recently got a new motherboard for my Intel Core 2 Quad 9300-based PC (the old motherboard was fried). The old motherboard was an ASUS IP35 Pro, while the new one is a Gigabyte G41MT-S2.

Since the change in motherboard/chipset, I've noticed that when the PC is idle for a long time, the power LED is turned off and the computer doesn't respond to keyboard/mouse events. However, pressing the power button results in a near-instant restoration of state.

The computer is clearly not in S1 suspend state, since the PSU appears to be off. Is this normal behaviour for any of the ACPI states? Is this what is supposed to happen in S3?

Chinmay Kanchi
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Your power supply's behaviour is dictated by the power state. A computer in sleep/standby mode is said to be in the S3 state, which still requires the RAM to be powered (otherwise, you couldn't instantly resume using your computer after pressing the power button). AFAIK, the S1/S2 states are rarely (if ever) used in modern operating systems, although as @grawity mentioned, the Windows XP/2003 will only use the S1 state if wake-from-USB is enabled.

The only way to check this is to verify what you set your power settings to be, in your operating system.

Given your description, the computer indeed is in S3 mode. Your PSU appears to be off, but really isn't. It just draws so little power to keep your RAM alive that the PSU fan doesn't need to be spinning to cool it (since there's nearly a no-load condition).

Finally, it should be noted that some motherboards support waking the computer from S3 via USB (moving the mouse or pressing some keys on a keyboard will usually do it, sometimes you have to keep doing it for a minute or so).

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