ROG Strix z690 slow boot and stability issues

[Papason]

Hello all
Newcomer to that Asus forums, but long time buys of Asus motherboards and other products. Most all my builds over the past 12 years have contained at least an ASUS mobo.
I’m having issues with my latest build. Here are the specs for the build:

Windows 11 Pro
Asus ROG Strix z690 E-gaming current Bios
Intel i9 12900 KF
ROG Ryujin 360 II AIO
G.Skill DDR5 Model F5-6000J3636F16GX2-TZ5RS
EVGA RTX 3090 FTW3 Ultra gaming
EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 G6, 80 Plus Gold 1000W
Lian Li O11DXL-W O11 Dynamic XL ROG Certified (White) ATX
6 Lian Li UNI Fan SL120
SAMSUNG 980 PRO SSD 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe Gen 4 x2
Seagate IronWolf 8TB NAS Hard Drive 7200 RPM 256MB Cache
Seagate IronWolf 6TB NAS Hard Drive 7200 RPM 256MB Cache

The issue I am having is that the entire system is very unstable. The amount of time it takes for the board to pass all tests and intiate devices takes at least 30 seconds. Once it does finally post ( sometimes it will restart the PC during this phase 2 or more times, which makes me assume a piece of hardware is failing, possibly power is inconsistent) the ASUS page is slow to load and pass over to loading windows login screen.

The RAM check on boot and the IDE initialization is where most of the boot time is consumed. If I leave everything at default setting in the BIOS things seem to run a little better, but boot time is still extremely slow. My previous AMD build w/ 5900x & ASUS X570 Crosshair Dark Hero was 10x faster at booting than this machine. One difference is that it had 64GBs of G.Skill DDR4 4000.
If I change the BIOs settings to apply the XMP profiles and add set AI optimize the CPU performance, things become even more unstable and it will often shut down 5 seconds into powering on, often doing this 2x or more. Once it does get past the Asus Logo screen, Windows will BSOD occasionally.
Once in windows I have issues with apps crashing especially games. I often get BSOD screens when doing things with Armory Crate or some other apps. The BSOD error I’ve seen the most is the Watch dog error. Event viewer hasn’t been helpful in finding a cause. I’ve seen several Kernel warnings for processor xx has been 0 due to system firmware. Google Mentioned disabling Intel SpeedStep or it might have been Intel Speed shift. I just disabled these settings last night so have not been able to test
Could the BSODs be related to the I Instability of Windows 11? Also, I have never had much luck with Aromy Crates software. In the past I would not install it, but this time it’s necessary to control the AIO.
What could be the cause for all these issues). Bad RAM? Bad PSU? Bad motherboard
I’m sure it’s hardware related, but don’t know which piece it may be. I’ve already had to RMA the exact same mobo model for dead DIMM slots. Is there a chance I got another bad board? I’m afraid to run any real performance stress testing because I’m positive it will BSOD. I have HWmomitor and. HWinfo as well as Aida64, Memtest, and Prime95. Can anyone suggest a tool that might actually capture the what hardware device is causing the slow boot, and or how to prevent the BSOD. My other i9 build (i9 7600x) back in 2017ish that was on an ASUS Prime mobo, overclocked very easy and with a custom loop, temps never got above 50 Celsius under extreme load and over clocked to 5.1.
Thanks for any tips or tests I can run to find the culprit.

[spatula75]

Do you have any external drives plugged in? I was experiencing something similar at one point, and the culprit was an external spinning-rust drive. I found that if I unplugged it during boot, it booted a LOT faster. Then I replaced it with an SSD and things have been a lot better ever since.

The same drive wouldn't appear in Windows, or if it did appear it wouldn't work properly, until I unplugged and replugged it; then it would be fine until a reboot.

(I kind of suspect the drive has a somewhat buggy controller, which you wouldn't expect to be a thing anymore in 2022, but I had two of the same model of drive, and both of them exhibited the exact same behavior, consistently.)

For the system stability, my usual move is to get onto the latest BIOS, restore all the settings to the defaults, change only what I need to change and nothing else, and keep track of my changes. I was also experiencing some instability in Windows itself up until recently (I hope it's gone now anyway) and opted to uninstall ALL the Asus cruft, then do a repair install of the Management Engine drivers, then reinstalled Armoury Crate and let it install what it felt like it needed. I also recently disabled the Asus "Multicore Enhancement" in the BIOS in the hope that would lend more stability to the system, even if it's at a small performance cost.

[Papason]

spatula75 wrote:
Do you have any external drives plugged in? I was experiencing something similar at one point, and the culprit was an external spinning-rust drive. I found that if I unplugged it during boot, it booted a LOT faster. Then I replaced it with an SSD and things have been a lot better ever since.

The same drive wouldn't appear in Windows, or if it did appear it wouldn't work properly, until I unplugged and replugged it; then it would be fine until a reboot.

(I kind of suspect the drive has a somewhat buggy controller, which you wouldn't expect to be a thing anymore in 2022, but I had two of the same model of drive, and both of them exhibited the exact same behavior, consistently.)

For the system stability, my usual move is to get onto the latest BIOS, restore all the settings to the defaults, change only what I need to change and nothing else, and keep track of my changes. I was also experiencing some instability in Windows itself up until recently (I hope it's gone now anyway) and opted to uninstall ALL the Asus cruft, then do a repair install of the Management Engine drivers, then reinstalled Armoury Crate and let it install what it felt like it needed. I also recently disabled the Asus "Multicore Enhancement" in the BIOS in the hope that would lend more stability to the system, even if it's at a small performance cost.

spatula75 wrote:
Do you have any external drives plugged in? I was experiencing something similar at one point, and the culprit was an external spinning-rust drive. I found that if I unplugged it during boot, it booted a LOT faster. Then I replaced it with an SSD and things have been a lot better ever since.

.The same drive wouldn't appear in Windows, or if it did appear it wouldn't work properly, until I unplugged and re-plugged it; then it would be fine until a reboot.

(I kind of suspect the drive has a somewhat buggy controller, which you wouldn't expect to be a thing anymore in 2022, but I had two of the same model of drive, and both of them exhibited the exact same behavior, consistently.)

For the system stability, my usual move is to get onto the latest BIOS, restore all the settings to the defaults, change only what I need to change and nothing else, and keep track of my changes. I was also experiencing some instability in Windows itself up until recently (I hope it's gone now anyway) and opted to uninstall ALL the Asus cruft, then do a repair install of the Management Engine drivers, then reinstalled Armory Crate and let it install what it felt like it needed. I also recently disabled the Asus "Multicore Enhancement" in the BIOS in the hope that would lend more stability to the system, even if it's at a small performance cost.

When you say "external drive" are you referencing spinning disk drives? I do have 2 install, both of which are Seagate Ironwolf drives. I've had them both for less than an 2 years now and up until this build, both were have functioning fine without issue.

I will try unplugging both of the drives and see if there is a performance gain.

The issue with the RAM taking so long to pass the check has me considering that the problem is actually faulty memory. I can get the RAM to run the XMP 3.0 profiles, but again, stability becomes a concern. If unplugging the HDDs h as no affect on performance, I will try taking out one stick at a time, and then try each DIMM slot.

I'm sure I wouldn't be the first person in the world to receive 2 boards that had the exact same issue on both mobos.

I appreciate you taking the time to pass on your own experience. Thanks for the suggestions and sorry for slow reply. I'm on my second round of chemo in the past 4 years, plus I work in IT, so most days the last thing I want to do is get back online to read email, let alone attempt to for component sentences.0


Cheers!
Bryan