Fastest POSTing 1155 Motherboard (Z77)

[Ben90]

I wait exactly 0 seconds for my computer to boot up. Start brushing teeth -> turn on computer -> finish brushing teeth -> use computer.

*edit*

Tried sleep and its completely useless. RAID card takes about a minute to spin the HDDs up one by one.

 

[repoman0]

You wasted approximately 137 times more time writing this thread and picking the motherboard with the fastest POST time than if you would have just picked a board with a decent feature set and waited the extra 5 seconds every boot up, every time for the next 3 years.

S3 sleep my friend - the less you shut down and start fresh in these days of modern OSs, the faster they will run. Just get 8GB of RAM and leave stuff open.

 

[gramboh]

Haven't read the thread but wanted to share, my Asus P8Z77-V Pro is about 15 seconds time power button to Windows login. Breakdown is 9s post 6s Windows logo (might be reverse need to check). I have a custom JPEG for my BIOS splash if it matters (Asus lets you do that now, pretty cool since BIOS/UEFI logos are ugly as hell).

Config:

Onboard audio - disabled
Onboard wifi/Bluetooth - disabled
ASMedia SATA3 - enabled
ASMedia USB3 - enabled

Boot device = Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 240GB on Intel SATA3 in AHCI mode.

 

[Lagittaja]

Sorry for bumping an older thread.
I have two rigs.

Main rig:
Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z
Intel G530 & TR-TS120 passive
XFX HD5750
XFX 550w
8GB DDR3/1333/CL9
Intel 520 Series 60GB (boot), Samsung Spinpoint HD103UJ&SJ (storage)

HTPC:
Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H r1.1
Athlon II X2 240 + Noctua NH-U9B
HD5670 + Accelero S1 Rev. 2
S12II-330
4GB DDR2/800/CL5
Samsung 830 Series 64Gb (boot) Western Digital WD1001FALS (storage)

And the main rig is so SLOW. Even though I have disabled EVERY possible useless controller.
Main rig:
desktop to desktop restart: ~29-35 seconds
cold boot: ~35-40 seconds
sleep to desktop: ~30 seconds
HTPC:
desktop to desktop restart: 27 seconds
cold boot: 32 seconds
sleep to desktop: ~4.5 seconds

So, I'm planning to replace the motherboard in my main rig, the mb is great otherwise but the extremely poor POST/BOOT times are just unacceptable.
I use sleep a lot, both my rigs go to sleep after 15 minutes of inactivity and I would prefer the sleep to desktop time to be as low as possible.
Would the Z77 Extreme4 be a good choice?
I don't overclock, I don't need iGPU or anything like that, all I need is just a solid motherboard for stock use.

 

[RussianSensation]

Most of these are obviously trivial to find out, however the most important one is IMPOSSIBLE to find out. It's almost all that I care about, in fact I'd give up almost all the other criteria if it meant having a POST time more like 2 seconds than 10 seconds.

No one tests it because the 2 factors that often have a greater impact on how fast a computer boots from a cold boot are OS and SSD speed. Somtimes motherboard speed matters but only if you don't have Quick Boot enabled in the BIOS and disable useless settings such as detecting extra SATA Ports/Floppy, IDE if you dont use them. To get the motherboard to boot the fastest, you can disable everything you don't use (onboard sound, all ports you don't use, etc.). After that it'll come down to how fast Windows 7 boots and SSD speed (Windows 8 should improve in this area). You won't get any motherboard that boots into Windows 7 from a cold boot in 2-3 seconds without altering the OS registry and so on.

Here is quick look at SSD speed for Windows 7 boot:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/22401/10

Even what you are saying doesn't make logical sense. Pressing the button on a computer and for that signal to travel to the motherboard and the motherboard to start checking that the GPU/CPU/RAM/HDD/fans and input devices are all connected and functioning correctly will take more than 7 seconds by the time it boots into the desktop on Windows 7. That's exactly why they created the boot from sleep function so that the motherboard doesn't have to go through all these testing procedures.

I wait exactly 0 seconds for my computer to boot up. Start brushing teeth -> turn on computer -> finish brushing teeth -> use computer.

Exactly. There are ways to "solve" this issue without blaming the hardware. Not many people would sit there and worry whether a compute takes 2 vs. 10 seconds boot times on a daily basis if it means the compute taking longer to check that all the devices are properly turned on and working. Also, a lot of people don't even turn the computer off and it goes to sleep with wake up time of 1-2 seconds. Sometimes it takes me longer to wake up and actually get out of bed at 6am than the 20 seconds it takes for a computer to boot from scratch. If 8-10 seconds makes a difference in a person's day, they gotta re-assess where they can save more time in a real tangible way. For example, someone can get an automatic toothbrush that works exactly 2:00 minutes with a timer. I bet that would save a lot more time than 10 seconds or randomly guessing how long it takes to brush your teeth properly. 😉

 

[Diogenes2]

If sleep to desktop is taking 30 seconds, there is something going on that no motherboard I know of will help ..