Asus P6T Deluxe V2 - Slow POST

[DragonQ]

I know these boards are notoriously slow at booting but I've also heard from a couple of forummers that my time is particularly bad. It basically takes ~15s before the monitor even turns on, then ~10s performing the POST, followed by a ~15s Windows boot from my SSD, in a best case scenario. I just wanna know if anyone here has any experience or suggestions for trying to reduce POST time on this or other P6T boards? Below is a list of all of the things I have currently done in an effort to reduce POST time.

• Turn on "Quick Boot".
• Disable "Full Screen Logo".
• Disable "Express Gate".
• Set first boot priority to SSD.
• Disable unused hardware (floppy disk, second ethernet port, Marvell storage controller, firewire).
• Disable "Legacy USB" so that external HDDs aren't powered on and then off again during POST.
• Set "Add-On ROM Display Mode" to "Keep Current".
• Turn off auto-detection for empty SATA port (other 5 are full).
• Disable monitoring of fan speeds and voltages (left temperatures on just in case).
• Reduced the IDE timeout to 0s.
• Set DRAM timings manually (they were actually set to 9-9-9-27 and should have been 8-8-8-24).
• Set "Plug and Play OS" to "Yes".
• Unplug my memory card reader (I've read that these can cause boot problems).

The only other thing I can think of is to just set it to optimised default and re-do my overclocking but that's a bit of a hassle and I don't think it'd make any difference. It's just really depressing to have a fast Windows boot time but still have to wait 40-45s to use the PC, which is what most people can get with a normal HDD anyway.

Any ideas will be appreciated dudes. Thanks.

 

[NoxTek]

You're pretty much stuck dealing with it, and most other boards are this way now. Maybe UEFI will bring something better...

In the meantime I would suggest using S3 and putting your machine to sleep, with an SSD wakeup is nearly instantaneous.

 

[RickyJ]

15 seconds before showing the initial POST screen is a bit long, how much RAM do you have installed? I've got the same board in my work machine and this part of the process takes a solid ~7 seconds with 3x2GB of Corsair (have yet to actually time it). If I remember correctly, the X58's memory controller does some pre-flight checks during this time.

POST itself can be slowed down greatly by your hard drives reporting to the BIOS upon detection, the fewer the hard drives (and newer) the faster it'll be. Just one sketchy Seagate 7200.11 in mine and it flies through POST.

That's just my experience though.

 

[Dopamin3]

Have you tried flashing to the latest available bios?

 

[DragonQ]

You're pretty much stuck dealing with it, and most other boards are this way now. Maybe UEFI will bring something better...

In the meantime I would suggest using S3 and putting your machine to sleep, with an SSD wakeup is nearly instantaneous.

Have you tried flashing to the latest available bios?

I used to use S3 but there's a bug in either the OCZ Vertex 2E's firmware or Intel's RST drivers that cause a BSOD when resuming from S3 with the SSD installed, so I can't use it at the moment. I already have the latest BIOS and I highly doubt Asus will be releasing a UEFI BIOS for this board, unfortunately.

15 seconds before showing the initial POST screen is a bit long, how much RAM do you have installed? I've got the same board in my work machine and this part of the process takes a solid ~7 seconds with 3x2GB of Corsair (have yet to actually time it). If I remember correctly, the X58's memory controller does some pre-flight checks during this time.

POST itself can be slowed down greatly by your hard drives reporting to the BIOS upon detection, the fewer the hard drives (and newer) the faster it'll be. Just one sketchy Seagate 7200.11 in mine and it flies through POST.

That's just my experience though.

I have 3x2GB of OCZ Gold RAM. I do have 3 HDDs in addition to my SSD but their detection during POST only takes ~1s total. They could be slowing down the "pre-POST" process though but even if they are, there isn't much I can do about that. In the future I'll be using a file server with just an SSD in the main machine but that's a few years off yet.


I have actually tried resetting the CMOS and the pre-POST time dropped to a constant 10s, even after applying nearly all of my optimal settings again. However, the last thing I did - overclocking - slowed this process down again to 14-15s. Obviously I'd prefer to overclock than speed up boot time by 5s so, again, not much I can do there.