Last weekend I tried to put together a new machine with all new parts except a few SSD’s, a soundcard and the case.
Specs:
-AMD 9950X3D
-64GB Corsair 30-6000 RAM
-Samsung 9100 2 TB nvme drive
-Gigabyte Aorus pro X870E mobo
-RTX 5080
Took some doing but eventually we did get it to power on. However, it would only power on and there was no video output. After some searching I’ve come to conclude it was a memory training issue (apparently DDR5 can take a long time to do this, this was new to me).
Eventually we got into bios and installed win11, which was extremely slow even by MS standards.
Once in Windows though, several issues:
-Task manager shows only 8 of my 16 cores
-Overall performance seemed very slow considering the hardware
So I went back into the bios, disabled all the “performance” options for the cpu, loaded optimized defaults and after that I did have all 32 threads visible in task manager, but this disabled EXPO for the RAM. If I re-enable EXPO, I again only have 8 visible cores in task manager.
On top of that, booting up takes ages. The Aorus splash screen appears almost immediately but remains there for MINUTES before loading windows, which also takes a good minute by itself.
I tried to flash the BIOS but I already have the latest available version installed.
From searching and Chatgpt I’ve gotten the answers that it’s possibly a memory issue (doesn’t seem to “remember” the training, having to do it over every boot?) or an issue with connected drives/usb/… being detected slowly, but I’ve aready set the bios to fast boot, only take SATA drives from last boot, only EFI, etc etc but nothing seems to have any effect.
Edit: after another day of testing and troubleshooting, we’re almost good.
-core count fixed, was caused by a “gaming” setting in the bios?? that I had never heard about.
Slow boot remains but is apparently due to the high amount of connected drives (1 optical, 1hdd, 2 sata ssd’d & 4 nvme drives. So something I’ll have to live with unless I disconnect the drives.
Been benchmarking & stress testing since the fix and results are looking very hopeful. Temps don’t exceed 70°C even under full load (cinebench) and gpu remains at a crisp ~64°C. Framerates are great as hoped/expected and at full blast I still barely hear it because of the Noctua cooler.
All in all a gigantic mess and lots of frustration, but eventually worth it. Thanks again for your thoughts and perspectives, it definitely pushed me in the right direction!
Just to verify, is this a setup with 2x 32gb ram sticks? If so I’d start by checking that you have them in Slots A2, B2
It is, and they are :)
No chance you’ve got a live disk laying around you can boot to and run memory tests from? Hopefully someone else will come around and say they’ve had the same problem before. I’m impatient and usually would go straight to either removing 1 stick and testing boot times and swapping to the other stick after to compare.
A Mint install laying around on a flash drive likely should allow you to boot into and run memtests without needing to install anything. Maybe it will help narrow down if there is an issue with the drive the OS is installed on, but I think I’m just rambling about things you already have thought about.
Maybe this:
"I got it to quick boot with a BIOS tweak on retaining RAM profiles. I found a quick video to fix the issue.
Under DRAM Timing Controls, I just set Memory Context Restore to Enabled. Now it clears CMOS in like 15 seconds and boots windows in another 15 seconds. So basically normal speeds."
Different board but same symptoms
Usually memory training happens before the splash screen happens so it’s probably not training.
With 64 gigs of ram I wouldn’t expect a boot to be quick, but it shouldn’t take minutes. I think my older 5800x machine with 64 gigs of ram takes 30 seconds to post. DDR5 and the newer CPU should make it much quicker though. My laptop with 64 gigs of ram definitely takes less.