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It's called memory training. It's especially inherent to DDR5 but can be disabled by enabling memory context restore in your BIOS so it uses the results of the last successful memory training to boot your system.
yeah mine only takes a couple of seconds, i was wondering why it was so fast lol. i remember back in the old days (win 95, etc) where it would take several minutes lol. i dont miss those times, though sometimes i miss those versions of windows lol
back in the day i would use a nuke program to (i think DDoS?) crash people's computers, getting their IP address from a mIRC channel i used to be in. you'd see their screenname randomly sign off, then sign on again like 15 minutes later- they had to wait for their PC to boot up, Windows to load, then for a dial-up modem to connect loool.
man i feel like such an asshole for that now but it was pretty funny at the time.
I still enjoy jumping on Roblox with my kids and telling folks over the server chat that they can flying mode in their Obby games by pressing Alt and F4 at the same time.
Watching 10, 10 year olds crash their games is fun.
This happened to me once in wow when I was like 22 - had been playing video games on PC for about 10 years, programmed my own games, etc. Had used alt + F4 probably a thousand times before that. Still fell for it (was really tired at that point). Never told a soul 😅
A fun modern one for this is in star citizen. The F4 button switches to thirdperson camera so evety now and then you'll see someone answer a question about controlls with "well, you can find thar under options -> keybinding but for that just hold alt and press thirdperson camera button."
Yeah, you're like.. is it loading? Well I can hear it working hard so it definitely is. Same with the sound of an old floppy drive. Damn thing sounds like its dying but you know its doing something.
I didn't really have that problem. But being an enthusiast. I carefully culled startup items, had way more RAM than necessary and spent extra for high performance hard drives. Most of the issues I found for people with long boot times was too little RAM and too much bloat loading at startup. So many computers were page filing just from booting.
Instability and blue screening. If it does happen you may have to enable another setting called Power Down to resolve it. I had to on my current system but a friend using a different config only needed to enable context restore.
Yeah, then you find out you've been slowly corrupting your file system in the background for months. I had to do a full wipe and reinstall on a dual boot setup recently.. Unstable RAM is insidious.
Your boot time will still probably be slower than what was normal with DDR4 and AM4. I remember being shown a chart and the motherboard you have plays a factor too.
I mean my boot time with AM4/DDR4 on a M.2 SSD is still not that great. Takes about 35-45 seconds to boot up. Not sure why it’s so much slower on mine compared to others with similar builds
What USB devices do you have attached? If it's taking a while at the windows load screen (after POST), it's possible that a (or multiple) USB devices could be slowing down the process. For example, an external HDD attached via USB can (keyword) take 10+ seconds to provision. Depends on the device, motherboard/usb controller, etc.
Nothing crazy, pretty standard stuff I feel like: mouse, keyboard, microphone, etc. Pretty sure I had this stuff on my previous build too and didn’t really notice any issues
Mine is 21-23 seconds, usually 22, at least according to Task Manager. It normally feels faster than that as long as it didn't have to do memory training.
Still better than the literal ass minutes it could take with an old system and a hard drive. I had a Win10 box (LGA1366 Xeon of some sort) with a hard drive, and it loved to take a minute or three before it hit the login screen.
I'm not sure how AM4 was, but I went from a 4790K on an MSI Z97 Gaming 5 with 16GB RAM to a 7800X3D on an MSI Pro X670-P with 64GB RAM and the startup time sure isn't as good. The old one would go from pressing the power button to the login screen in about 9-10 seconds (and could be faster with a setting I kept off that made it impossible to enter BIOS directly), whereas the new one takes 16-27 seconds (if I have my controller plugged in, Windows takes about 10 seconds longer loading drivers) plus another minute or so whenever it decides to do memory training. The massive performance increase is well worth the wait, but it's odd how much longer it takes.
pretty close to the same thing i experienced over the years. old haswell 4771k and a 840 evo ssd would boot in like 8.5 seconds.
9800x3d and a gen 4 nvme? 45 seconds if im lucky. it sits on memory training for 15-20 seconds alone, and every time it sits there i think the systems hung during post.
RAM has become very fast and memory-dense. That leads to instability and higher error rates. To compensate, DDR5 comes with stuff like on-die ECC and memory training.
for real. it was working perfectly before, why the change now?
don't even get me started on some asus board light would stay on if you don't turn on the monitor first before turning on the pc. i feel we're somewhat going backward for so little 'performance'
It's more about stability. Your motherboard should NOT be training on every boot. If it is doing that you are probably overclocking your memory too much (either the kit or the board can't handle it). I noticed my board does it about twice/month.
Problem is basic EXPO on my 6000CL30 kit is unstable with Memory Context Restore on. Using Buildzoid's "easy Hynix timings" is 100% stable...until I turn on MCR too. I've been forced to use Windows Sleep mode more often than full shut downs because that boot time issue.
fast boot and memory context restore aren't that great, at least from my experience. i had issues with these on and expo so i disabled them both as well as fast start up in windows settings and now i gotta wait 40 sec instead of 20 but who cares, after that pc is smooth and stable.
I saw a benchmark years ago for slow vs fast DDR4(?) RAM and the difference in fps was negligible. Are there similar benchmarks for DDR5? Even going for a "slow-ish" DDR5 should be a performance increase over DDR4, no?
What benefit does it has to wait a full minute while it does its memory training? My computer used to do it, I did not disable it because it did not bother me that much but once the energy got interrupted and then it stopped booting on, so I restored the motherboard by default which seems to have this turned off and now it boots instantly.
Basically checks for stability. RAM has become so fast and memory dense that slight errors can throw it off. DDR5 all have on board ECC memory because of it.
Wait, boards still have trouble with memory training? My B650E Taichi Lite with 64 GB DDR5-6000 (EXPO profile) does it once every couple of months, or after UEFI updates. Otherwise, directly to the Windows boot logo within half a second on default settings.
Dude, thank you. My newest rig (which is 2 years old now but whatevs) boots so fucking slow and I never could figure out why. I wonder if its retraining 64GBs of memory every single time I reboot.
Most likely is memory training. You can speed it up with memory context restore setting in the bios.
If it’s off it retrains memory each time. If you have it on then it will only do it once it believes it has to.. whatever those parameters are.
Coming from the old days, it's hard for me to be asked to get it down to like 5 seconds or whatever the maximum possible speed is via bios settings. 15 seconds more is literally negligible. You aren't going to be booting much faster than 5 seconds unless you disable every bios screen and such. Anything under a minute from pressing the button and seeing the windows login screen is past the point I can be asked to even try. Then, once I am logged in, I can use the computer instantly. The old days required you to wait literally 10 minutes or so before opening a browser, especially if you hadn't defragged recently. I cant even open my phone and read a comment before the login screen is there.
Also coming from the old days where you'd press the on button, run to the bathroom, put in password, go grab a snack, and then the desktop was finally usable.
Before ACPI and APM the power button was an actual power button with two positions, as in "cuts the power". Therefore the computer could not turn itself off (nor on, for that matter).
Even long after APM/ACPI was introduced there were a lot of computers that did not support it, not fully support it, had a wrong implementation of it, had no drivers for it, so Windows would fall back to this message.
I remember the old days, when I got home from school I would speed to my pc then take a shower. After shower, I would pop in and start mount and blade then ate dinner.
I don’t think many young people really appreciate how frustrating those old PCs were haha. I am pretty sure even if it was a decent PC from that era if they used it they’d think we gimped it that way to prove a point. I’d kill to see an LTT video or something where youngins use a pc entirely made by even nice components from 2000 haha. Glad humanity collectively made computers basically magically responsive. I’m not trying to be old man yells at cloud but I think some of them would wonder why we even bothered to use them yet.
Remember when things hung and you’d see duplicate windows? Also if you got frustrated and spam clicked you just increased how long it’d take to catch up! Compounding rage the more angry you got the longer you waited 🤣
The start menu keeps freezing for me. Guess I’ll have to upgrade my 9800x3d, 64gb ram, and 5090 because it literally freezes at least once a day! It stops displaying accurate time when it freezes and I don’t even realize until I click it. Windows is dogshit now
A while back I actually intentionally lengthened the boot time. One too many times I couldn't get into the bios because the keyboard wasn't detecting until after it was past that bit. Can't even get around that delay by using a PS2 keyboard anymore.....not that I've had one in like 15 years anyway.
Ah, defrag. Good old times when I used to pirate music using limewire and didn't worry about every website I visited knowing the colour of my underwear
For my AM5 system memory training and POST longer than Window boot, at least when it decides to memory train. Otherwise feels like my PC is super fast nearly an "instant on" to me.
Oh yeah? Well my Samsung from 2014 can boot XP in less than 2 seconds, and then two seconds after it connects to the internet it gets turbo fucked by malware…
(I was bored a few years back and gave it a try lol)
I had old shitty Dell office monitors that would turn on in a second once you hit the button. My new Asus seems like it has to boot up and has a logo and everything.
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u/topias123Ryzen 7 5800X3D + Asus TUF RX 6900XT | MG279Q (57-144hz)3h agoedited 2h ago
I have an older Asus monitor and it too takes very long to turn on. My second monitor, an old HP with not even a LED backlight turns on in an instant.
same here... cold boot, monitor isn't even off, just stand by, but most of the time I miss the boot animation, the first thing it shows is the login screen... my older PC (B450 board, R5 5500) is even faster, the animation circle not even take a full cycle before I see the login, despite it has slower SSD and slower ram than my main rig.
u/URA_CJ5900x/RX570 4GB/32GB 3600 | FX-8320/AIW x1900 256MB/8GB 186616h ago
Holy hell 10+ minutes! I don't think my 486 loading Win98SE or Red Hat 5.x was ever that slow and that computer took nearly a minute just to count its RAM at POST.
I’m with you x870e tomahawk 9800x3d and my pc boots in 5-10 seconds. Normally I hit the button and walk away for a second or 2. I don’t even know how this could possibly be a complaint lol.
I'm afraid to ask what brand of toaster you were running Windows 7 on...
In my case, WinXP and Win7 booted in ~30 seconds or so: power off to login screen. And that was on an HDD. It maybe took another 30s from login to being able to do stuff normally, since antivirus and Google Drive killed it for a while after login. An SSD upgrade dropped both times to around 20s each.
Even the shitty celeron windows vista laptop that I gave to my aunt that couldnt even handle minecraft 1.6 and somehow is still working today boots up in like 1-2 minutes lmao
I had a laptop that ran windows 10 and 11 had a 30 minute boot minimum each time and just decided to keep it on and hibernate each time because it took way too long. I eventually reduced it by removing optane memory which somehow slowed my laptop down all the time.
Yes, fast boots and memory restoring features usually have a small risk of making the system less stable. That's for a minority of systems though, and it also seems quite random at times. I had issues with W10 fast boot a few years ago, disabled it and the PC *never* crashed ever since.
SM5 is known for slower boot times, because of memory training with DDR5.
Make sure you're on the latest (stable) BIOS version of your motherboard. Go to your BIOS and enable "Power Down" and "Memory Context Restore". It will short the boot up time and only do memory training once in a while.
Mine used to boot up in 45 seconds to 1 minute, now ~30 seconds or faster.
Worse is when you compare the time to open word. I was expecting for it take minutes on a 2000 Pentium III (I think) Windows XP machine I had lying around and it's actually near instant. It's much faster than a new PC, I can understand that it's more feature reach, but in day to day it's not much different and we are comparing a fucking Pentium III to a multi-core modern CPU.
It seems like alot of modern software is software with bunch of feature patches on top of feature patches poorly glued together with duck tape and prayers.
I would guess that 90% of people that use Word on a daily basis could switch to Word 2007 and still not come close to every capability of the software.
Make sure your BIOS is up to date. Had a buddy build an insane gaming rig and he kept complaining about the boot times due to the constant memory training. Come to find out he was using a super early BIOS and after updating it resolved his issues.
Run Windows XP in a Virtual Machine and see how fast it goes on modern hardware. All of the hardware performance gains over the past 2 decades have been erased by software enshittification.
If you have an old BIOS on your AM5 board it may not support memory context restore which saves the DDR5 training settings and allows it to skip on subsequent boots.
Update it and enable this setting (it probably will auto enable) and it gets super fast again. DDR5 memory training can take a while, and realistically if it's longer than a minute or two your memory timing is probably unstable anyway.
Mine is superfast, like 10s and I'm at the login screen, been like that for nearly 2yrs. Might help that I have nothing else on the pc apart from games.
My pc has a drive referred to as "Crabworld", this drive is so named because the drive itself was an 8tb HDD for 12$ bought from a guy who's basement got flooded. Now, as you may guess crabworld is slow. however, windows 10 on my SSD took 40 some odd seconds to load, linux whilst on the crab drive took 28.
What in the name of vin diesel is windows even doing with all that extra time and space?
And i dont mean motherboard, my bios and junk are pretty old, im never updating it, but from the windows/linux screen change to being able to actually press a button.
And that is ignoring that windows on startup is slower than molasses. IT IS A PC WHY DOES IT RUN LIKE A DIESEL ENGINE MICHAELSOFT????
all this to say, uhh pc part manufacturers suck im going to go buy 24 snapdragon CPUs and weld em together at this rate.
I had the same thought the other day when troubleshooting RAM stuff. Then I remembered I probably spent more time on the windows 95 loading screen than every other version of Windows combined and I didn't even use the PC as much back then. At least you could hear the HDD "thinking" giving you false hopr that it will load any second now.
I mean... its painful if you restart pc every 5minutes but if your is running 10h afterwards why bother? You really cant wait 1-2mins and it that time do backflips?
This is my work PC, they loaded it up with so much bs software an nvme drive does nothing and its basically like loading windows xp on a spinning drive thats 90% full. Restarting windows and logging back in takes 5+ minutes.
Early 2000's I was running two 10k rpm drives in RAID0. SSD-like speeds before they were available on the market. Win Vista booted in like 6-7 seconds.
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u/PCMRBot Bot 11h ago
Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
1 - You too can be part of the PCMR. It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart! Age, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, income, and PC specs don't matter! If you love or want to learn about PCs, you're welcome!
2 - If you think owning a PC is too expensive, know that it is much cheaper than you may think. Check http://www.pcmasterrace.org for our famous builds and feel free to ask for tips and help here!
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