Intel Motherboards : Trouble with Ultra Fast Z170 OC Formula

Author: adabo
Subject: Trouble with Ultra Fast Z170 OC Formula
Posted: 27 Oct 2016 at 11:24am

Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. parsec wrote: I'm not sure about this since you did not mention it specifically, but the CSM option must be disabled in order for the Ultra Fast boot option to work. One important thing I must mention first is, the Ultra Fast "Boot" feature is actually causing the POST process to be significantly faster. The actual loading and running of the OS, is really not affected much if at all. The length of time starting a PC from a shutdown condition is really the sum of the POST time, and the time of the actual OS loading and executing. We tend to combine those two things into the "boot time", but in this case we need to consider the two as the separate, distinct processes that they actually are. There are two things I can tell you about related to the slower startup time you are asking about. They aren't fixes but simply realities of the situation. I also use a 950 Pro as the OS drive on an ASRock Z170 board. First, over time owners of NVMe SSDs have noticed that they tend to cause the length of the PC "boot time" to be slower than their SATA III SSDs. The reality of that is the POST time is longer for NVMe SSDs, so the overall startup time of the PC is slower. The first Intel NVMe SSDs for PCs (750 series) were particularly slow to get started and complete their part of the POST process. Intel has since provided two firmware updates for the 750 SSD to address that situation, the first update more so than the second. This has reduced their length of POST time, but they are still slower than SATA SSDs. Don't forget the POST procedure for a drive is not related to their performance, and their performance has no affect on it. Owners of Samsung 950 Pro's also noticed this, but most think they are "slow to boot" for some reason. You can read about this in the thread below, in another forum at OCN. The thread is long but about a third of the way into it the complaints about the "slow booting" begin: http://www.overclock.net/t/1579581/official-samsung-950-pro-owners-club Samsung, being unable to admit any shortcomings with their products unless they have no choice, have done nothing about it, if it is even possible for them to do so. Sorry, you won't find a fix in that thread. NVMe is a new protocol, unrelated to SATA. That means it is now a new part of the POST procedure, if you have an NVMe SSD in your PC. It must be done on top of everything else that is already done in POST. Perhaps that process is not yet optimized as the others are. One thing that likely causes it to be slower is the NVMe controller is part of the NVMe SSD itself. Where is the SATA controller in a PC? It's part of the chipset in the mother board. Both of these controllers are listed as separate devices in Device Manager, and each uses their own drivers. The second thing to consider is something we don't think about. Again, this is all about the POST process. Why do we expect every PC platform or system to start up (POST) at the same speed, or in the same amount of time? We take it for granted that there is no difference, but there are many reasons why different systems are slower than others. Have you ever owned an Intel X79 or X99 system? I have an X99 system, and after pressing the power button, I don't hear the POST complete single beep for at least 15 seconds. Why so slow? How about eight DIMM slots to check for memory, and then there may be up to 64GB - 128GB of memory to check. Instead of 16 PCIe lanes on a Skylake processor, the X99 HEDT processors have 28 or 40 PCIe lanes. Plus the X99 chipset is borrowed from the Intel enterprise line of chipsets. Enterprise/professional computers value stability and perfection over a startup time that is less than 10 seconds. Our Z170 boards have three M.2 slots to check that are connected to the chipset itself, rather than the PCIe lanes of the CPU. Your OC Formula board is more complex than most mother boards, and an older OC Formula board I have is slow to POST. Long story short, all Z170 boards likely take longer to POST too. Z77 boards simply POST much faster. Nothing can be done by you to "fix" your startup time, unless CSM is not disabled. Change to a SATA III SSD and remove the NVMe SSD. That's not a joke. The fastest starting PC I have now is the ASRock DeskMini, with an i3-6100 CPU. The mother board has the H110 chipset. No PCIe slots at all. One M.2 slot, two SATA III ports. No OC, memory at 2133. I've tried both the 950 Pro and an Intel 600p in it as the OS drives. The boards are so simple, POST is quick and they both are at the desktop five seconds from pressing the power button. Enable Ultra Fast boot, it's like waking from Windows Sleep. Next is my Z87 Extreme6 board with a Pentium Anniversary CPU, and SATA III SSDs, and no video card. I've learned simple CPUs start up faster too. Do you have the same version of Windows in both PCs? Same hardware? Everything counts towards the length of POST. The simpler the PC, the faster it can start. NVMe SSDs do not usually appear in the M.2 slot listed in the Storage Configuration screen. New UEFI versions now show them in that screen. The DeskMini 110 is the first board I've used that listed an NVMe SSD in the Storage Configuration screen. They are of course listed in the NVMe screen, and in the System Browser tool.

Thank you for your detailed and informative reply! Everything you said actually made sense to me, despite not knowing a great deal about motherboards.

I'm quite certain I disabled CSM. I read a thread somewhere here that mentioned disabling it for faster boot.

The hardware is not too dissimilar as they are basically a few generations apart. Z77: i3770k, GTX 970, 8GB RAM, Intel 535 SSD. Z710: i6700k, GTX 1070, 16GB RAM, Samsung M.2 ...

Both machines were installed using the same USB with Windows 10 on it.

If it's just a matter of accepting that NVMe is a so new that it's slower, that's fine. I just didn't know if there was anything at fault on my end.

Also, I understand that POST time and Windows Loading are 2 different times. Actually, I'm disappointed that Windows load time on the Samsung M.2 is slower than the SATA drive on the other board. I'll have to look for a way to see what's taking up the time loading Windows on the Z170.

Thanks for your time, parsec!