Abysmal POST times

Noughtboy · 4 Jan 2011 at 12:23

Hi everyone,

I have noticed that recently, my POST time (i.e. the time taken to get a Beep out of the computer and before it even starts loading the OS) has over the last couple of months increased to about 45 seconds.

Having read through this I will summarise my questions first and then give the background.

1. Are my PSU or HDD (or both) responsible for slower POST times?
2. Is it a potential RAM issue?
3. Is the cold weather to blame? (I boot up around 06h00 and ambient temp probably 2C)

I never really timed it before as it was never that much of an issue but reckon it used to be about 20-30 odd seconds. The machine is over 5 years old and relevant specs as below but it may have coincided with the installation of the new GPU. Am I being paranoid or am I looking at a potential problem with the PSU or the HDD? I defrag at least once a week (Defraggler) and run HDD Health all the time. As an aside, I noticed that HDD temperatures have started to creep up over the last 5 months or so (in summer about 54C and currently 40C) which I think are about 5C higher than usual.

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (the first person to snigger will be infested with a plague of fleas in their armpits)
ASUS A8R-MVP Motherboard
X-Pro 500w PSU
Powercolor ATI 5850 GPU
WD 2500KS 250MB HDD
2x 512MB DDR (forget brand)

It is used mainly as my home trading machine running two monitors (soon to be three) and for some gaming and will be upgraded soon (I run an AMD Athlon II 640 at the office). In the meantime don't want any downtime or loss of data (though most relevant data is backed up on my office machine).

Thanks

NB

Hagar · 4 Jan 2011 at 12:56

It is probably initialisation of the GPU if that does coincide with the installation date. The only way to test is with another GPU. Possibly the HDD is getting a bit old. I am not sniggering about the spec. Should be quite capable for home trading etc. The monitors would not affect the post time or the PSU output. I would upgrade the PSU at the same time as you upgrade the CPU, HDD etc.

andy.

Noughtboy · 4 Jan 2011 at 20:04

Could it really take a GPU so long to initialise? If so, annoying but does not give me reason to worry greatly. My concern is the PSU aging and 'blowing up' leaving behind it a trail of Siliconi-roshima or the HDD dying losing the most recent data and causing a reinstall or the RAM failing leaving my home machine on the fritz.

Any other thoughts?

Thanks again

NB

cammy5477 · 4 Jan 2011 at 20:19

ive had asus boards in the past that have taken ages to post..... try going on to the asus website and installing the latest chipset drivers and bios updates for your board...this hopefully will sort it out..... your psu wouldnt do this though and although your hdd is a possible bottleneck that wouldnt make it hang in boot for 45 seconds

are you using windows xp? have you changed any bios settings in the last while?

Ch3m1c4L · 4 Jan 2011 at 20:19

probably hdd or gpu, some gpus are just slow on cerain boards. if the psu is really old i guess it could affect the time for the gpu but otherwise it should be fine. Maybe the HDD has gone into PIO mode and takes forever to respond to the mobo, or have you accidently turned on SMART in the bios (this doubled my post/boot times), and windows still does smart monitoring, just means it doesnt test at boot up i think.

Your HDD temps are WAY high, mine peak at around 35 and thats with fans removed from the bays and about a million of them in my case. Isnt like 50 a max operating temp for them?

Justintime · 4 Jan 2011 at 21:16

Likely GPU, some video cards just take a while to initialise in certain boards. Check if theres an option to for video to select which slot to boot from first, PCI/PEG1/PEG2 etc..