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Something about UEFI and add-on video cards?

Red Squirrel

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
I've just experienced this on at least 3 completely separate PCs, a typical UEFI based computer, you add a video card, and from that point on, it does really weird stuff at bootup. Typically it just loops into various shades of dark screens (pure black, somewhat black, monitor going to standby, etc), or just acts really slow, or overall is just really dumb. It requires to fiddle with it for half an hour or so such as hard powering it off, resetting it etc, then eventually it boots up properly. I never turn off my home PC because of this very issue and it's just one of those things I never even thought of researching further as I can never find much and it's only an issue when having to turn it on.

Is there a known issue of this nature? This is kinda vague, I can get more details if needed such as actual hardware specs (I'm not home right now to check), but considering I've seen it on 3 different machines now I'm starting to think it's some kind of common issue. Two of my machines at home do it, and the one at church started doing it after an add on video card was added. Is there some kind of setting that needs to be enabled in the bios other than disabling the onboard? Or anything else that needs to be enabled/disabled?

The PC at church made me realize that something weird is up, now that it makes 3 PCs that I see this type of behavior.
 
For UEFI boot configuration, the video card firmware requires a "UEFI GOP" firmware. Most newer generation video cards already include such a firmware, which allow using in both UEFI and non-UEFI systems. Some older video cards can be flash upgraded to include a UEFI bios, such as a GTX 650 card I was able to flash upgrade. There's a free utility "GPU-Z" which can diagnose the presence or absence of a video card's "UEFI GOP" firmware.
Note: even on-board Intel GPU's would require a "UEFI GOP" firmware for proper UEFI operation.
 
vailr said:
For UEFI boot configuration, the video card firmware requires a "UEFI GOP" firmware. Most newer generation video cards already include such a firmware, which allow using in both UEFI and non-UEFI systems. Some older video cards can be flash upgraded to include a UEFI bios, such as a GTX 650 card I was able to flash upgrade. There's a free utility "GPU-Z" which can diagnose the presence or absence of a video card's "UEFI GOP" firmware.
Note: even on-board Intel GPU's would require a "UEFI GOP" firmware for proper UEFI operation.
Click to expand...

What do you mean by the second acronym -- "GOP?"

I could make a joke about the Politics & News forum, but I'm clueless and can't figure it out.
 
I was hoping I could blame this on Trump or something. 😛 When I get home I'll grab the specs of my PC and post them, maybe I can get to the bottom of this.

I never knew updating firmware on a video card was even a thing, so maybe we can determine if that's what I need to do and go from there. I'll at least start with my machine then I can look at the others that experience the same thing.

All I know is that UEFI is an overall pain, next machine I build is going to be server based, so far UEFI has not taken over servers yet, thankfully.
 
There are several things to watch out for in this. UEFI isn't better or worse then legacy BIOS, but there are differences, and plenty more things that can potentially go wrong. It's also important to mind that the UEFI includes a legacy BIOS interpreter. Older operating systems wouldn't work at all if there wasn't.

Related to the above is the often overlooked fact that you can install the OS in two distinct modes, the legacy BIOS mode, or UEFI mode. This causes a lot of confusion in my experience.

If we're talking about an older* graphics card, you may need to enable "compatibility support module" in the UEFI. Manufacturers have different implementations of this, so check your MB manual. As mentioned newer cards include the required UEFI GOP, so should be plug-and-play.

*and to make matters worse, cards using the same GPU can have different firmware implementations, and "newer" cards can have "older" firmware. Its a jungle out there.
 
XavierMace said:
Yes it has. Every server I've touched in the last few years is UEFI. But I haven't had any issues with UEFI either, on desktops or servers.
Click to expand...

Damn that sucks then. It's been a while since I've built a server but all the ones I built were non UEFI but last one was several years back. They boot so much faster with a normal BIOS. I find even when UEFI based systems work, they are much slower to boot because of all the extra luggage it has to load. It's basically like loading a whole OS before you can load the real OS.
 
Red Squirrel said:
It's basically like loading a whole OS before you can load the real OS.
Click to expand...

That isn't far wrong. UEFI has more in common with a miniature OS then the old-fashion BIOS. Which after all stands for Basic Input Output System, with emphasis on "basic".

In fact, as already stated, UEFI often includes a full BIOS emulator...
 
Red Squirrel said:
Damn that sucks then. It's been a while since I've built a server but all the ones I built were non UEFI but last one was several years back. They boot so much faster with a normal BIOS. I find even when UEFI based systems work, they are much slower to boot because of all the extra luggage it has to load. It's basically like loading a whole OS before you can load the real OS.
Click to expand...

Some UEFI's are slower than others, but that's generally as much due to the configuration as the UEFI itself. The only servers I've dealt with where UEFI was what I would describe as painfully slow is some IBM M2's, which was their first server to use UEFI IIRC.
 
FWIW, my server which is an Asus Sabertooth X79 board with a Xeon 2670 is blazing fast to boot with an AMD Radeon R5 240 GPU in it. Granted it does run headless...
 
For the one system that always gives me issues this is the specs:

Video card: GeForce GTX 750 Ti
Motherboard: Z97MX-Gaming 5
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-4150 CPU @ 3.50GHz
Ram: 3 x F3-17000CL9-4GBZH (12GB total)

Not sure what other details may be needed. OS is Linux, but these issues happen before it even starts to load. Typically I have to force reset it several times before it finally starts to POST properly.

I am now experiencing the same thing on a totally different machine (a "clone" and not a self build) that is running Windows 10. It started when I added a video card to it too. If I take the video card out of my own system, the problem goes away and it posts much faster overall.
 
Red Squirrel said:
For the one system that always gives me issues this is the specs:

Video card: GeForce GTX 750 Ti
Motherboard: Z97MX-Gaming 5
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-4150 CPU @ 3.50GHz
Ram: 3 x F3-17000CL9-4GBZH (12GB total)
Click to expand...

I'd recommend going with either 2x or 4x memory sticks of the same size and manufacturer/specifications.
With 3 memory sticks, you miss out on the speed benefit of "dual channel" memory configuration.
The printed motherboard manual should include an explanation about this.
 
I had 4 but one died, so now I'm stuck with 3, and motherboards now days don't take kindly to mixing different type of ram or even ram from different batches so I don't want to just put another random stick in there. So yeah I'm aware of the penalty in speed but I don't really do much processing/gaming on this machine so I don't really notice it. Or could that actually be a source of the slow POSTing?
 
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