Slow 'Last BIOS time'

jamieboo

jamieboo

jamieboo

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Joined
29 Oct 2009
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369
Hello folks

Over the last couple of months I have got myself an Oculus Rift and an MSI 1080ti - all very nice and generally working splendidly!
However I have recently noticed that my BIOS times are slower than usual. Not Windows boot time, but the actual initial BIOS part of startup.
The Startup tab in Task Manager lists 'Last BIOS time' as 22 seconds, or more. Sometimes considerably more. I gather that a general rule of thumb for this figure is that anything less than 10 seconds is ok. And I remember the last time this measurement caught my eye it was around 4 seconds.
So something has happened. And I'm guessing that it might have something to do with either the Rift or my new GPU.
Both of these seem to be working perfectly.
I'm running the 385.69 GPU driver which runs everything fine - and I've gathered on forums that it is more solid than more recent NVidia drivers. I have not installed any of the Geforce Experience stuff and I used Display Driver Uninstaller to get rid of previous driver debris.
My Oculus software is up to date and it seems to be stable. I've tried starting with the Rift unplugged but the issue remains.
My PSU is SuperFlower Leadex Platinum 850W - a well regarded PSU I gather. And 850W should surely be sufficient.
I have a i7 5820, 32GB 2400 RAM, an AsRock X99 Extreme6 (latest Bios - 3.20) and everything is running off Samsung EVO 850 SSD's. I have not changed any of my BIOS/UEFI settings and Fast Boot has always been disabled.

It's not a huge problem but I would really like to get to the bottom of what's causing the delay.
There are various Windows boot logging apps, but is there anything that logs the BIOS part of the process?

Any ideas?

Thanks very much!
 
Can you disconnect the Rift usb connection easily?
I keep my Rift unplugged unless i am using it and have not noticed any boot time change
If i keep my Rift connected i do notice it gets warm though
 
Yeah I tried disconnecting it and it made no difference to boot time. I disconnected it at the headset, as the rear of my PC is awkward to get to. But I'm wondering if simply the Oculus drivers/runtimes might be causing some issues, regardless of whether the headset is plugged in or not?

This is all conjecture though.
This slowdown of BIOS has happened recently, and the only significant changes to my PC recently are the Rift and the 1080ti - so I'm just assuming that they must have something to do with it!
Any other ideas?

Thanks
 
Thanks for the response HoneyBadger.

No, nothing like that is enabled in my BIOS.
Nothing has changed in my BIOS since well before the problem appeared which makes me think the culprit is not a BIOS setting.

Are there any precedents to the notion of hardware changes causing BIOS slowdown? I've already tried unplugging the Rift - nothing. So could my new 1080ti have something to do with it?

It would be really useful if there was some kind of user-friendly logging app that would log the whole BIOS process, and so help me narrow down the problem.
Is there such a thing?

Thanks
 
An app like that would be impossible as all the stuff that is happening during POST is before anything loads. AFAIK 20 seconds is quite normal for X99 boards.
 
Unfortunately the old card is already sold so I can't try that.
If I could, and swapping in the old card showed that the 1080ti was indeed causing the problem, what exactly could be done about that?
What could the mobo and GPU be chatting about at such garrulous length?
Is it a question of NVidia drivers? Is it power? (As I said, I'd reckoned my 850W PSU to be adequate)
 
It is doubtful that this would be related to drivers as they would be for Windows and you are saying that you delay is in the BIOS initialisation which would be way before they are even loaded.

During the BIOS portion of the boot process the BIOS will be handshaking and doing low level initialisation of the hardware in the system so something like a new graphics card could affect this and this could be affected by things like the firmware on the graphics card. As Andarial says unplugging USB devices could be a good idea too.

As to what is happening and what to do about it ... Does the BIOS have any options to increase the verbosity of its screen output during boot (and maybe temporarily turn off things like quick boot if on) so you can see what is happening?

At the end of the day, turn the machine in, go make a cup of tea, and it should be ready when you are and don't worry about it.
 
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