BIOS boot times

Razzi · 31 Dec 2011 at 15:01

Hi everybody
Just wondering if anybody has any info on boot times with various motherboards - I'm particularly interested in either the Asus P67 Sabertooth and the Asus P8Z68-V. What I mean is the time from pressing the power button until the OS starts to load.
On my existing setup the time from power on until the Win XP login prompt is 59 seconds - 30 seconds of that is the motherboard BIOS, POST and RAID screens, only 29 seconds for the actual loading of windows. I remember an old Abit motherboard, possibly BH6, where there was an option to turn off the RAID altogether, rather than having it waste 20 or so seconds of the boot time. Obviously only if you dont use it, but almost all motherboards these days seem to have it installed.

Surveyor · 31 Dec 2011 at 16:08

As far as I'm aware all motherboards which support RAID can have the feature "turned off".

If the SATA controller is set to IDE or AHCI mode then you don't see a post screen for RAID setup.

Likewise if the motherboard has an additional SATA controller, such as Marvell, this can be turned off in the BIOS if not needed.

JasonKnights · 31 Dec 2011 at 16:37

I have P8P67 board with an SSD drive for windows. Ive just counted and takes 19 secs from turn on to being able to go on internet explorer page

Razzi · 1 Jan 2012 at 12:24

JasonKnights said:
I have P8P67 board with an SSD drive for windows. Ive just counted and takes 19 secs from turn on to being able to go on internet explorer page

Oooh that's pretty impressive: 19 seconds including POST screens. I did buy myself an SSD a few weeks ago to improve things - I knew I wouldn't get the full benefit using XP on my older system, but I thought it would improve things until I got a new system. However my lovely Asus A8N-SLI Premium refuses to boot from the SSD :mad:

And Windows 7 also refuses to install, so I'm bringing forward my hardware upgrades!

Razzi · 1 Jan 2012 at 12:30

Surveyor said:
As far as I'm aware all motherboards which support RAID can have the feature "turned off".

If the SATA controller is set to IDE or AHCI mode then you don't see a post screen for RAID setup.

Likewise if the motherboard has an additional SATA controller, such as Marvell, this can be turned off in the BIOS if not needed.

Thanks for that, so hopefully when I decide what to get and then build a new system that will improve the boot times if I can turn off the RAID screen. On my existing Asus A8N-SLI Premium I am not aware of any way to turn off the 'press ctrl-h to show RAID setup' appearing for about 10 seconds. On an old motherboard like I mentioned above, a Bh6 I think it was, there was an option in the RAID setup screen to decide how many seconds to show the prompt for, so I set that to the minimum of 1 second.