Asrock AB350 Pro4, slow boot

I've bought a second hand computer (see spec below). I upgraded memory to 32GB and installed a NVMe SSD and a CD player. The NVMe is plugged into the M.2 Ultra socket M2_1. The Nvidia card is plugged into the PCIe2 socket. Even before this upgrade it seemed to take longer than it should to get anything up on screen. It's a fresh validated, fully updated install of Windows 10 with hardly anything else installed and it's taking 35 secs to cold boot to a login screen which seems excessive to me. Shutdown is superfast.

From power on it takes 28 secs before anything appears on my screen and another 6 secs before the windows is up and ready to let me log in. So it looks like the computer is waiting for something to happen that never does?! What on earth is it doing? Is it trying to boot off the slave SSD first?



Operating System: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1600 (Summit Ridge 14nm Technology)
RAM: 32.0GB Dual-Channel Unknown (16-17-17-35)
Motherboard: ASRock AB350 Pro4 (AM4)
Graphics: 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB (ZOTAC International)
Storage:
Slave: 223GB SanDisk SDSSDA240G (SATA (SSD))
Boot: 476GB Sabrent NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 (Unknown (SSD))
Optical Drives:     ASUS DRW-24D5MT
Audio: NVIDIA High Definition Audio

Make sure to set your boot device priorities right. BIOS might have your DVD as primary boot device. Set it to your boot drive, and disable any others afterwards. Also, disable boot from LAN where ever that setting might be hidden these days.

Also 32Gb of unknown memory on 1000 series Ryzen is a pure lottery, and motherboard probably is failing to POST few times before continuing.

Also, latest BIOSes for Summit Ridge Ryzen might improve load times, because early ones have a lot of debug code which slows down POST.

There are some utilities/programs which measure boot process and report what action takes how long, that way you can see more precisely what is the problem. These programs do not report of anything before POST however

GusGF wrote: I only had to disable other devices in the boot menu but still taking 28 secs to see a bios screen come up on my screen. And then only another 6-10 secs to get to a Windows login screen. My BIOS is 3.2 and the upgrade path is 3.40(Bridge BIOS), then 5.40 followed by 5.80 which is as far as I can go with my current CPU. Do think it's worth upgrading? Well the delay is happening during POST, at least it's 28 secs before anything at all comes up on my screen and I see boot options. Many thanks

The delay in POST means memory training failing (most likely). Is memory running at intended speeds?

When you boot into BIOS, Main page shows up, it tells you how much memory you have which slots are populated and speed they are running at.

Did you know that there is 64MB DDR4 memory stick in the world :D :D (sorry that had nothing to do with your issues, just saw it in your motherboards manual)

You can check memory speeds in Windows with CPU Z utility, memory Tab I believe. It tells you the speed you are running at given moment divided by 2, so if your RAM is running at 3000Mhz, CPU Z will show 1500Mhz. Do you have that memory speed set up in BIOS?
After updating BIOS, make sure network boot aka PXE boot, some motherboards enable that by default and you have issues booting fast due to PC trying to find remote client to boot from. Also make sure DVD is not your primary boot device.
However I still suspect RAM might be the issue