I have cold boot issues

[Macgruber]

I will appreciate very much if one of you could help me figure this out

I've tried googling alot of things and haven't found a solution

I'm running a Intel i7 2600k @ 3.8ghz 1.1500v in bios on a MSI z77a-G45 mobo with Corsair XMS PC15000 8gb @ 1866mhz XMP.



So basically, I turn the computer on, all fans go, SSD doesn't kick in, comp turns off

it restarts

All fans go, ssd kicks in, it boots into windows


Is my voltage for the RAM/CPU too low? I'm not really OC'ed except i just put the CPU at 3.8ghz instead of it using the turboboost feature, CPU-Z shows i run at 1.136V in Windows 7 but bios is set to 1.1500v

Your help will be appreciated. I dont want my mistake costing me a mobo/cpu/ram/ssd later on.

I've never edited any voltage other than the cpu!

 

[Sheep221]

Set CPU back to stock and see if the issue persists, but this seems to be motherboard or PSU related.

Power on and restart are abit different processes, restart is action where the RAM is cleared, though power on involves turning on all the stuff inside.

 

[Vectronic]

CPU voltage should be fine, if it was bad enough to screw up POST it would never boot into Windows. (assuming it's not resetting to a stock setting when it boots the second time).

*Could* be a PCH/Southbridge/RAM thing... all of those when undervolted too much will work sometimes, not others.

But... are you fully shutting down, or are you using hibernate/sleep? If it's the latter, something might not support the state/level it's shutting down to... so when it resumes, something just doesn't turn on... it reboots which re-initializes the start-up nonsense for everything, and it's good to go.

Mostly ramblings, but may be helpful...lol

 

[moonbogg]

This sounds like the original sandy bridge motherboard cold boot bug. I would make sure bios is up to date. If that doesn't fix it, I would try taking ram sticks out to see if thats the issue.
I had similar problems with my 2600K rig when i first built it, and I took ram sticks out and put them back in 1 at a time and the mobo suddenly worked. Its like it was stuck for some reason and fiddling with the ram made it un stuck.

 

[Idontcare]

My gigabyte DS3L mobos with Q6600's installed and OC'ed have done a "twice-boot" sequence for years. Anytime I cold-boot them the sequence is the same. Press power button, system immediately powers on, fans are on, lights are on, then after about 500ms (maybe 1s) it all goes black, fans spin down, then about 1s or 2s later it power back on all by itself and proceeds to post and boot windows all normal like.

OC settings remain intact, nothing changes. It just does this double-boot thing in the beginning and always has.

 

[Macgruber]

thank you so much for the help guys!

i only do shut down on the desktop, i heard shutting down a laptop kills lifespan and have always used sleepmode for desktop not sure why i've never used sleep mode for desktop so i cant say since i havent tried

it does sound like something cold boot related because it really only happens when i turn comp on hours after it being off.. im going to try to take a ram out and swap them, i was scared to update the bios because i've always heard to never do it unless theres a bug fix on the website or theres a chance it can be worse than the current

hopefully it boots instant tomorrow! thanks again ill post after i try these things, i really appreciate the help and time you took to reply to me ;D~

 

[Macgruber]

so i think its the ram, i unplugged ram while cold, plugged 2nd ram back in, it booted on first try.

when setting up X.M.P to run the ram at its core speed of 1866 i noticed on the restart it did the full shut down, paused 3 seconds then booted up, i havent tried a cold start power on since then

does this mean at worst ill need to up the rams voltage a little bit? or is the cold boot restart something common and harmless?

 

[Vectronic]

Restart after applying/saving in BIOS, or restart from within the OS?

If it's the former, that's normal... that latter, not so much.

You could certainly try playing with voltage, but I would doubt it would change anything unless the voltages are way off. You could also skip the XMP and set the timings manually, everything else (for RAM timings) on auto. You could also try 1800, or 2000.

My RAM (stock @1600) despises 1866, not only is it harder to get stable than 1800 or 2000, it runs slower than 1800. (that may not *actually* be the RAM, just Ivy not liking 133 multipliers, but 2133 works fine)

Did you try updating the BIOS?... ASUS has had double-boot problems in the past, "supposedly" fixed with BIOS changes.

8GB... 2x4GB, or 4x2GB?... "plugged 2nd back in"... second set, or stick?... what happens with the reverse, double-boots with those, or still boots fine?

 

[Puppies04]

i heard shutting down a laptop kills lifespan

I heard the moon is made of cheese.

On a serious note would you care to explain where you heard this and what reasons were given?

 

[Macgruber]

I heard the moon is made of cheese.

On a serious note would you care to explain where you heard this and what reasons were given?

Shutting down youre notebook fully forces every electronic part in it to turn off
Turning it back on will cause wear and tear (shock) to all these components

In essence, youre computer will lose lifespan every time you click SHUT DOWN vs SLEEP

isn't this obvious?

 

[Macgruber]

Restart after applying/saving in BIOS, or restart from within the OS?

If it's the former, that's normal... that latter, not so much.

You could certainly try playing with voltage, but I would doubt it would change anything unless the voltages are way off. You could also skip the XMP and set the timings manually, everything else (for RAM timings) on auto. You could also try 1800, or 2000.

My RAM (stock @1600) despises 1866, not only is it harder to get stable than 1800 or 2000, it runs slower than 1800. (that may not *actually* be the RAM, just Ivy not liking 133 multipliers, but 2133 works fine)

Did you try updating the BIOS?... ASUS has had double-boot problems in the past, "supposedly" fixed with BIOS changes.

8GB... 2x4GB, or 4x2GB?... "plugged 2nd back in"... second set, or stick?... what happens with the reverse, double-boots with those, or still boots fine?

yea the dual restart was after applying bios settings
8gb of 2x4gb dual channel, i only took out the 2nd stick then plugged it back in, since it did boot normal after everything i didnt want to keep fiddlign with it, but i know it has to be something to do with runningXMP @ 1866,
the ram is the corsair xms pc1500 ram ;0

 

[Vectronic]

I sort of anecdotally, or wives-tale agree with the laptop shutting off/on a lot reducing life-span.

Laptops run hot... capacitors don't really like to be charged/discharged a lot... but otherwise it's not really the electricity that degrades components, but more so the drastic temperature differences. Constantly going from 20C to 70C to 20C, you get a fare amount of expansion/contraction from the temperature differences... that's bad when tolerances are very small.

It's the same for desktops too, just much less so... an always-on system will last longer than an on/off system... same as incandescent lights... or anything electronic really.

"XMS" That? (so not finding 2x4 1866 XMS anywhere)... if so, it might be trying to run it at 1.5v instead of 1.65... one stick at 1.5v might run fine... 2, probably not.

You might have to play with:
VTT ... raise it in little increments, if 0.03v more makes no difference, give up.
PLL ... this varies widely, anything between 1.5 and 1.9v, for my board, less is sometimes more.

*maybe* VCCSA... don't go above 1.0xx

But it does seem like something more than voltage fiddling.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I sort of anecdotally, or wives-tale agree with the laptop shutting off/on a lot reducing life-span.

Laptops run hot... capacitors don't really like to be charged/discharged a lot... but otherwise it's not really the electricity that degrades components, but more so the drastic temperature differences. Constantly going from 20C to 70C to 20C, you get a fare amount of expansion/contraction from the temperature differences... that's bad when tolerances are very small.

It's the same for desktops too, just much less so... an always-on system will last longer than an on/off system... same as incandescent lights... or anything electronic really.

"XMS" That? (so not finding 2x4 1866 XMS anywhere)... if so, it might be trying to run it at 1.5v instead of 1.65... one stick at 1.5v might run fine... 2, probably not.

You might have to play with:
VTT ... raise it in little increments, if 0.03v more makes no difference, give up.
PLL ... this varies widely, anything between 1.5 and 1.9v, for my board, less is sometimes more.

*maybe* VCCSA... don't go above 1.0xx

But it does seem like something more than voltage fiddling.

I also heard it was better for the hard drive not to power up so much, but I believe the hard drive powers down in sleep mode anyway.

 

[Macgruber]

I heard the moon is made of cheese.

On a serious note would you care to explain where you heard this and what reasons were given?

some other people have posted some info for you, im surprised that not even you know of this and im a techie noob and i know

I sort of anecdotally, or wives-tale agree with the laptop shutting off/on a lot reducing life-span.

Laptops run hot... capacitors don't really like to be charged/discharged a lot... but otherwise it's not really the electricity that degrades components, but more so the drastic temperature differences. Constantly going from 20C to 70C to 20C, you get a fare amount of expansion/contraction from the temperature differences... that's bad when tolerances are very small.

It's the same for desktops too, just much less so... an always-on system will last longer than an on/off system... same as incandescent lights... or anything electronic really.

"XMS" That? (so not finding 2x4 1866 XMS anywhere)... if so, it might be trying to run it at 1.5v instead of 1.65... one stick at 1.5v might run fine... 2, probably not.

You might have to play with:
VTT ... raise it in little increments, if 0.03v more makes no difference, give up.
PLL ... this varies widely, anything between 1.5 and 1.9v, for my board, less is sometimes more.

*maybe* VCCSA... don't go above 1.0xx
But it does seem like something more than voltage fiddling.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...25812&csid=_61
Corsair CMZ8GX3M2A1866C9 Vengeance 8GB PC15000 DDR3 RAM - 1866MHz, 2x4096MB, Non-ECC, Unbuffered

I also heard it was better for the hard drive not to power up so much, but I believe the hard drive powers down in sleep mode anyway.

sleep mode doesnt fully power down your system, and it definately increases the lifespan on a laptop




is it that bad to bump the voltage on the ram? i heard people saying to never go past stock, it voids warranty, it can kill your ram...

i guess my final question to you guys is... is a cold boot bad for my equipment? id rather keep my stock voltage on ram and have a cold boot instead of increasing voltage.. thats IF cold boot doesnt do any harm

thanks for all your help guys!

 

[Vectronic]

I suppose theoretically it could void the warranty, however, I'm not sure how they would find out if you overvolted the RAM (excluding an extreme case, like 3volts where it might actually melt something).

Overvolting is fine within tolerances, it can kill your RAM but generally only at well over stock voltages.

You should be able to easily over-volt yours to 1.6v without hurting it, especially at stock speeds/timings.

Mine is stock at 1600, 1.5v... but I've had it as high as 2200 @ 1.63v, typically RAM (like processors, and many other things) are over-volted at stock voltage.

At stock speeds, I can go all the way down to 1.3v (didn't bother trying for lower)... @ 1800 1.4v... 2000 1.475v.

You can safely over-volt to 1.55v it will have zero effect, *if* it does.. your RAM was already close to death anyways.

A double-start is fine... it means something is going wrong somewhere, but other than the already existing problem, it's only going to decrease life-span by 2% or something ridiculous over a 10 year span.

Edit: The comments at Newegg are interesting, some people can't run it at 1866, only 1333 or 1600... one guy had it up to 1.66v.

Not that Newegg comments are any sort of validation or anything...lol

Cons: I'm not sure the MB issue or the memory issue.

It only runs stable at 1333Mhz Even I manually set all voltage & timing, it won't boot at 1866 Mhz.

It can boot in at 1600 Mhz but the MB will reset every times if the system is fresh start up.

Overall, I think it's MB's issue. But MSI claim it's chipest or intel's issue.

I sent a titcket to Corsair for 2 business day now, no reponse yet. Kinda slow in my opinion.

I have been deal with other brands before, they used to reply in 1-2 business days.

Other Thoughts: My CPU is 2500k
MB is MSI P67 GD55.
PSU is 650W from OCZ
Asus GTX 460

 

[Puppies04]

some other people have posted some info for you, im surprised that not even you know of this and im a techie noob and i know

You know what? All i'm reading is old wives tales and what people have heard. I might use my laptop 1 or 2 hours a day when I work away from home otherwise it stays switched off. If you are trying to tell me turning it off and back on again causes "shock" and undue wear I wouldn't mind some proof otherwise i'm calling shens. Seems like a nice way to prematurely kill your battery though, I keep mine in my laptop bag at about 75% charge and after 2 years it still lasts exactly the same amount of time as when I bought it.

sleep mode doesnt fully power down your system, and it definately increases the lifespan on a laptop

Lets see some definitive proof then, i'm still waiting.

 

[Puppies04]

Oh and as for your original problem have you tried disabling EPU2013 in the bios, I found another forum that suggested that as a fix.

My P8-Z68V-PRO used to boot twice from cold until I changed the "option ROM" setting to keep current.

 

[Vectronic]

I might use my laptop 1 or 2 hours a day when I work away from home otherwise it stays switched off. If you are trying to tell me turning it off and back on again causes "shock" and undue wear I wouldn't mind some proof otherwise i'm calling shens.

That's different.

The ratio between degradation from thermal expansion/contraction between on/off and degradation from always on are going to balance out somewhere.

Naturally if you only use the computer once a day (or within reason), then turning it off after use makes sense.

If you are turning it on and off every 45 minutes to do a quick e-mail check and some messaging or whatever... that's much different.

You have 2 laptops, exactly the same down to the atomic level, one stays on all the time, the second turns off every 5 minutes, turns back on 5 minutes after that, repeat. The one that's cycling is going to fail quicker.

Sure it might take 2 years to fail, but it will fail before the always on one.

Lots of R&D has gone into reducing that, but this day and age it's not much of a concern, things are built with more consistent materials, tempering/annealing, and tolerances for expansion/contraction are allowed for, etc.

Obviously an always-on system that is running over-temperature... will fail before one that is off/on within reasonable cycles that also runs over-temperature when on.

 

[Puppies04]

That's different.

The ratio between degradation from thermal expansion/contraction between on/off and degradation from always on are going to balance out somewhere.

Naturally if you only use the computer once a day (or within reason), then turning it off after use makes sense.

If you are turning it on and off every 45 minutes to do a quick e-mail check and some messaging or whatever... that's much different.

You have 2 laptops, exactly the same down to the atomic level, one stays on all the time, the second turns off every 5 minutes, turns back on 5 minutes after that, repeat. The one that's cycling is going to fail quicker.

Sure it might take 2 years to fail, but it will fail before the always on one.

Lots of R&D has gone into reducing that, but this day and age it's not much of a concern, things are built with more consistent materials, tempering/annealing, and tolerances for expansion/contraction are allowed for, etc.

Obviously an always-on system that is running over-temperature... will fail before one that is off/on within reasonable cycles that also runs over-temperature when on.

Well I can imagine if someone was turning their laptop on and off on that many times a day it would cause issues eventually I assumed we were talking about turning it off at night.

 

[moonbogg]

so i think its the ram, i unplugged ram while cold, plugged 2nd ram back in, it booted on first try.

when setting up X.M.P to run the ram at its core speed of 1866 i noticed on the restart it did the full shut down, paused 3 seconds then booted up, i havent tried a cold start power on since then

does this mean at worst ill need to up the rams voltage a little bit? or is the cold boot restart something common and harmless?

This sounds like what happened to me. I seriously thought my MOBO was broken, but taking the ram sticks out and simpy putting them back in somehow fixed it completely. Hopefully yours does the same. Try shutting down for a minute then turning on and see if it works.
Regarding PC lifespan and turning it off...I heard the same thing but I assumed it had something to do with HDD's. In any case it was just something I heard and have no idea if its true or not.

 

[Sleepingforest]

i heard shutting down a laptop kills lifespan

I'm pretty sure it will reduce your battery left (since it has to save everything and starting up takes more energy from a cold boot than from sleep) but it doesn't really kill the maximum battery. My Macbook Pro (version 5,3), which is turned on and off several times a day, is still going strong. I timed it at around 6 hours (no sound or backlit keyboard and 12/16 ticks up for brightness sitting idly at the desktop) when I first got it and it's still at 5 and a half hours today.

What's more interesting for me is when putting your laptop to sleep will consume more energy than shutting it down (what time period of storage).

 

[Puppies04]

I'm pretty sure it will reduce your battery left (since it has to save everything and starting up takes more energy from a cold boot than from sleep)

It depends how long you are leaving your machine turned off. Sleep mode uses battery while active where as turning your machine off uses nothing.

 

[Macgruber]

You know what? All i'm reading is old wives tales and what people have heard. I might use my laptop 1 or 2 hours a day when I work away from home otherwise it stays switched off. If you are trying to tell me turning it off and back on again causes "shock" and undue wear I wouldn't mind some proof otherwise i'm calling shens. Seems like a nice way to prematurely kill your battery though, I keep mine in my laptop bag at about 75% charge and after 2 years it still lasts exactly the same amount of time as when I bought it.



Lets see some definitive proof then, i'm still waiting.

this is the thing man, various people are hinting at the obvious fact, but you want me to go get 10 google links to prove something to you in which i gain nothing, just google it for yourself man, trying to discredit my argument to make yours valid is not a good way to philosophize the proof is out there if you just click www.google.com and search it

Oh and as for your original problem have you tried disabling EPU2013 in the bios, I found another forum that suggested that as a fix.

My P8-Z68V-PRO used to boot twice from cold until I changed the "option ROM" setting to keep current.

i will try this... putting the ram out and back in worked but it also reset my memory to run at 1600 instead of 1866, i mean if the cold boot does not hurt then i dont mind it but if its hurting my pc then i do mind

computer might be off for 2-8hours and then on for 1-3days


guys i appreciate all the help btw

 

[moonbogg]

i will try this... putting the ram out and back in worked but it also reset my memory to run at 1600 instead of 1866, i mean if the cold boot does not hurt then i dont mind it but if its hurting my pc then i do mind

computer might be off for 2-8hours and then on for 1-3days


guys i appreciate all the help btw

If the ram causes issues at rated speed, just make sure the timings are set to spec and make sure that it isn't 1t but set to 2t. So it should be something like 9-9-9-24 2. Often times setting that 5th number to 1 will cause instability.

 

[Macgruber]

If the ram causes issues at rated speed, just make sure the timings are set to spec and make sure that it isn't 1t but set to 2t. So it should be something like 9-9-9-24 2. Often times setting that 5th number to 1 will cause instability.

ty so much

tonight im going to try to change the epu2013 option, and restart on the next cold boot

question: should i turn off XMP profile for the ram(which i beleive automatically sets it to max speeds) or should i set everything manual, ex: 1866mhz and the timings as well