25 second boot up delay after post/AHCI screens

Hi,

I've been offline for the last few days upgrading my system. I did this because of temp problems with my system, and it was time to get new hardware... Mine was two years old

I bought a GA-P67A-UD3-B3 mobo, an i5-2500 and 2 x 4g CL9 XMP memory modules running at 1600mhz

My temp on the old i7-920 was 15C above room temp. The i5 is about 5C with the Noctua cooler.

But after installing the nvidia video drivers and rebooting, having reinstalled Windows 7 Ult x64 from scratch something strange started happening..

After the post screen is shown, and the AHCI screen is shown the UD3 mobo displays "Loading Operating system..."

Then after 5 seconds is displays 20 dots on the screen one at a time, 1 second apart before it starts loading windows.

I was on the F2 BIOS revision, so I upgraded to the latest BIOS which is F4 but that didn't stop the delay.

Anyone seen this before (on this or other boards), and know why it happens and how to get rid of it?

thanks
Tanya

[QUOTE=TVeblen;1409696]I've not seen that on one of the newer boards/BIOS, so I can't be sure, but I can suggest some tests to try and isolate the problem.

If this issue started immediately after the installation of the graphics driver then you could have a bad driver install (happens) or a faulty video card. If you remove the driver and run the card on the generic Windows driver and the issue goes away then you can focus on the driver.
...
QUOTE]

Well, after extensive testing over the last few weeks I found that it occurs after installing the Intel 6-series chipset drivers. I've done complete windows re-isntalls, graphics drivers and installs and I have isolated it to occuring immediately after the chipset (INF), drivers are installed.

I tried it on the following motherboards;

Z68X-UD3R
P67A-UD3
P67A-UD3R
P67A-UD3P

I also tried a EX58_UD3R which uses the 5-series driver and it does not occur on that.

All of the motherboards are Gigabyte.

Of course, Gigabyte say that they have never heard or seen this.

I tested all the CPUs here; It occurs on I5-2500 and I5-2500K CPUs, but not on the I7-920

I also tried the following BIOS settings to see if that made any difference

IDE/AHCI comninations
Virtualization off and on
Stock voltages and overclocked voltages.

They made no difference.

Anyway, I'm just going to have to live with it.

A Guy said:

You might look for a Quick Boot option in BIOS. This will disable the memory and POST tests. Even if just temporarily to see if this is involved. Also, your MB supports EFI

How to access EFI in the new GA P67A-UD3-B3!

A Guy

Quick boot is already enabled.

My Mobo supports Electronic Fuel Injection.. That's neat

Seriously, thanks for the link

loquacious said:

Do not know if it is the same problem but I had an issue with long delay after display of "loading operating system" I spent a couple of hours trying to figure it out and found that somehow my boot drive was no longer the 1st priority drive in the boot sequence and it was looking for a floppy drive before finding my boot drive. This happened after upgrading my bios.

Well, I've now isolated the problem. I reinstalled Windows and left it completely stock. No motherboard drivers, and no applications, no tweaks, nothing.

I then reset BIOS on Z68X-UD3R to fail-safe defaults.

I then changed things one setting at a time.

Finally found it... Whenever I enable AHCI the problem starts.

If I leave AHCI off then it says "Loading Operating System" then "Boot from CD/DVD:" and then starts to load windows straight away. No 20+ seconds delay.

So, the question then ... Is AHCI really worth it? This problem aside, am I really getting any performance advantage, or any monitoring/diagnostic or functionality advantage by having AHCI enabled?

IIRC, the two main features of AHCI are hot plugging and NCQ. I have no need of Hot-plugging, but NCQ seems to make sense, especially since I often run multiple applications which perform simultaneous read/writes on the HDD. Such as media encoding, downloading, burning images and using word/excel all at the same time.

NCQ is also stated to reduce noise and power consumption. If this is true, and considering the loads I place on the HDD, is it advisable to keep AHCI enabled and live with the extra 20+ seconds boot time?

thoughts anyone?

Thanks
Tanya