Hey folks! I built a high-end PC two years ago, and I'm really frustrated by its boot time. It takes 35-40 seconds from the moment I hit the power button to when I can log into Windows. What's odd is that my brother's old 2016 ASUS ROG laptop, with a basic SSD and an i7, starts up just as fast—or even faster. Here are my specs:
- CPU: Intel i9-14900K (replaced and BIOS updated)
- Motherboard: Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Elite X Wifi7 (latest BIOS F10)
- RAM: 64GB Kingston Fury DDR5 6000MHz CL32 (running XMP Profile 2 at 5600MHz)
- SSD: 2TB Kingston Fury Renegade NVMe (reads/writes at 7-7.3GB/s, with 450GB free)
- GPU: AMD Sapphire Nitro+ 7800XT
- PSU: Be Quiet! Straight Power 12 1500W Platinum
- OS: Windows 11 PRO
Despite enabling **Fast Boot** and **Memory Boot Mode** in BIOS, I'm still stuck with that slow boot time. The DRAM and CPU LEDs blink a lot during boot, which seems to indicate it's doing full memory training each time. Task Manager says my last BIOS time is 11.6 seconds, but there's still a noticeable delay (15-20 seconds) before my monitor turns on. I've tried disabling startup apps, toggling XMP, enabling all Fast Boot options, and toggling VMD, but no luck. Is 64GB of DDR5 RAM causing this delay, or is it a Gigabyte or BIOS setting that I'm missing? I'd love to get this down to a more reasonable 10-15 seconds!
1 Answer
DDR5 is notoriously slow at booting. I managed to shave off 15 seconds on my Z890 setup by setting the RAM not to retrain each time, but it still takes about 30 seconds to reach the Windows boot screen. It seems like as RAM technology advances, we might be going back in time to those slow boot days of the '90s! Lol
Thanks for the tip! So does that mean the more advanced our RAM gets, the longer we have to wait? That's a funny thought!