Very slow boot time on Maximus XI Hero with 9900K and 970 EVO SSD.

[jewie27]

I've been running my Maximus XI Hero motherboard with 9900K cpu and 3200 Mhz memory for the past 3 weeks without problems on air cooling. I was using a Thermaltake Frio 14 Silent air tower. Last night I installed a Corsair H100i V2, temperatures are perfect. At idle 30 degrees and at load with stock cpu speeds 60C.
When I first did a restart/shutdown last night it took forever (over 2 minutes). This morning I booted up the system and it was at the ROG motherboard logo for 5 minutes just clocking in circles. When I pressed F2 or Delete, it took over 2 minutes to enter the bios. I have update the bios to the latest 0602 version and loaded default settings. I have not overclocked the system. Only XMP is enabled for 3200 Mhz CL 16. Booting into windows takes about 5 minutes. My boot drive is the Samsung 970 EVO M.2 NVME. It's plugged into the bottom M.2 slot which runs at PCI-E X4 speeds.

Prior to installing the liquid cooler I had no issues with booting or load times. Now my system is so slow it feels like an old Pentium 4 single core processor and IDE HDD.

Does the mounting pressure of the water block have anything to do with errors or boot times? How tight should the waterblock be? Thumb tight or should I use a screwdriver to snug the bolts down? I was seeing POST CODE A2 but it went away after I loosened the block a little.

Full PC specs in my profile, ignore my signature from my old build.

[howxcore]

check your cpu speed, make sure its not stuck @ 800mhz. You might have to turn thermal off in uefi for some reason since you changed cpu coolers.

[jewie27]

howxcore wrote:
check your cpu speed, make sure its not stuck @ 800mhz. You might have to turn thermal off in uefi for some reason since you changed cpu coolers.

there's no way it would be stuck at 800 mhz. the bios/cmos has been reset several times. It's running at 3.6 GHZ and still taking 10 minutes to get into windows.

[Menthol]

I have used Corsair AIO's for awhile, it is important not to use to much TIM and to carefully cross tighten the block but in my experience if mounted per instructions they cannot be over tightened.
Unplug all your USB devices except for mouse and keyboard and see if that makes a difference, if not remove your add on USB card and check again, unplug the Corsair block and check if needed

[jewie27]

Menthol wrote:
I have used Corsair AIO's for awhile, it is important not to use to much TIM and to carefully cross tighten the block but in my experience if mounted per instructions they cannot be over tightened.
Unplug all your USB devices except for mouse and keyboard and see if that makes a difference, if not remove your add on USB card and check again, unplug the Corsair block and check if needed

I'm using the stock layer of TIM that came with the unit. It was working just fine last night. I unplugged all usb device except for the keyboard and mouse. H100i V2 is also not connected by USB either, left that cable hanging. Still taking 10 minutes to boot into windows on the 970 EVO SSD. I've tried resetting the BIOS back to default settings and nothing is helping. I'm so frustrated, I spent $2000 on this new system and it's so slow. I am able to get into windows after 10 minutes and it runs without lagging after that. This bootup time is killing me! Even going into the BIOS takes 5 minutes after pressing delete or f2.

[Silent_Scone]

jewie27 wrote:
I'm using the stock layer of TIM that came with the unit. It was working just fine last night. I unplugged all usb device except for the keyboard and mouse. H100i V2 is also not connected by USB either, left that cable hanging. Still taking 10 minutes to boot into windows on the 970 EVO SSD. I've tried resetting the BIOS back to default settings and nothing is helping. I'm so frustrated, I spent $2000 on this new system and it's so slow. I am able to get into windows after 10 minutes and it runs without lagging after that. This bootup time is killing me! Even going into the BIOS takes 5 minutes after pressing delete or f2.

*


Have you tried with nothing connected to rule out the mouse and keyboard?

Make sure to remove the add-on card as Menthol has suggested, as well as any other expansion cards.

Given what has changed, I would consider reseating the AIO and CPU as well as the memory, too.

Lastly, try the EVO in an alternative M.2 port.

[jewie27]

Silent Scone@ASUS wrote:
*


Have you tried with nothing connected to rule out the mouse and keyboard?

Make sure to remove the add-on card as Menthol has suggested, as well as any other expansion cards.

Given what has changed, I would consider reseating the AIO and CPU as well as the memory, too.

Lastly, try the EVO in an alternative M.2 port.

I noticed that a hard drive was not showing in windows explorer. It wasn't being recognized. I disconnected the drive and the system booted up as normal. I didn't know it would affect booting because it was not the boot drive. I guess it was causing it to hang up. Just my luck, new system and a hard drive died. It was a 3 year old Seagate Barracuda. Now it's time to get that fixed.

[Silent_Scone]

jewie27 wrote:
I noticed that a hard drive was not showing in windows explorer. It wasn't being recognized. I disconnected the drive and the system booted up as normal. I didn't know it would affect booting because it was not the boot drive. I guess it was causing it to hang up. Just my luck, new system and a hard drive died. It was a 3 year old Seagate Barracuda. Now it's time to get that fixed.

Glad you found the problem. I'd recommend WD personally, if you're looking to replace it.

[Esoplayer]

I had the exact same issue on my new XI hero board. It would boot just fine and one morning it took over 5 minutes to shut down and 10 minutes to boot back up. I watched it patiently and I saw it list a repair process about one of my drives. I went into event viewer after that and saw countless errors all coming form one of my storage drives. I took it out and haven't had a problem since.

The more research I did. It turns out since most of these boards run on a single sata controller, and rhe way sata is designed. If one drive is corrupt or going bad, it will hang up the whole boot process as windows and the controller try to communicate. My problem was my aging Samsung 830 ssd.

[rjabend]

Esoplayer wrote:
I had the exact same issue on my new XI hero board. It would boot just fine and one morning it took over 5 minutes to shut down and 10 minutes to boot back up. I watched it patiently and I saw it list a repair process about one of my drives. I went into event viewer after that and saw countless errors all coming form one of my storage drives. I took it out and haven't had a problem since.

The more research I did. It turns out since most of these boards run on a single sata controller, and rhe way sata is designed. If one drive is corrupt or going bad, it will hang up the whole boot process as windows and the controller try to communicate. My problem was my aging Samsung 830 ssd.

Thanks very much for these posts. I had the exact same problem with really slow boots and the system bricking. I had two SSDs a 1TB & 2TB the 1TB had been a system boot disk and I made the 2TB a system disk via migration. Everything seemed to be fine and I thought the 2TB had been designated as the only system disk. The system was crazy slow some of the time and unstable. As soon as I disconnected the 1TB, the system booted up very quickly. I guess I will have to reformat the 1TB and try it again.

This has been driving me crazy for the last couple of days!! Thanks again!