Asrock 880 GMH-USB3 POST time (power on to bleep) Any information please ?

[snake.eyes]

Hi to Everybody and Thanks in advance for any help.

I have an 880 GMH with AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition CPU, 8Gb (2x4) Kingston RAM, and Sapphire 7850 GPU. The POST check takes about 50 seconds, is his too long ? It seems an eternity.
Windows 7 benchmark doesn't show anything wrong with a worst score of 7.3 from the HDD.

Thanks,
P.

[synack]

I don't know anything about that particular board, however I can give some generic pointers.

POST times will vary with hardware attached to it. Both in terms of quantity and models. The more things attached, the more the BIOS needs to enumerate.
things to look for:

Disable from boot anything you don't boot from. If you never boot from LAN for instance, why have it enabled? Floppy is another common one. USB devices can also cause grief.

Make sure your boot order makes sense. having your hard drive as the last boot item will significantly slow your boot times, as the bios iterates device by device looking for boot-ability.
i'm pretty sure your BIOS has a boot menu, so set your harddrive as the first and only boot device. Use the boot menu if you need to boot from network/USB/CD/Floppy etc.

Some older bios's let you scan for the harddrives and save that setting. Use that instead of "auto" that needs to enumerate all drives every boot. Sure, it wont be as plug-and-play when you add another drive, but it's not that big of a deal to pop into the bios to "rescan and save" when you need to.

Some bios' have a "fast boot" setting that skips various checks, like memory. If you have a stable system, it's usually OK to set it to "fast". when you do have issues, remember to disable fast mode for troubleshooting.

[snake.eyes]

Synack, Thanks for the pointers. I've already taken these steps, and only look for the HDD with OS or CD/DVD at boot. The only 'add on' is the video card and front panel USB/card reader, all other devices are on board.
Unfortunately, I don't have the facility to swap another AM3 CPU and I can only get another couple of GB of RAM to compare timings.

[synack]

Just for kicks and giggles, have you tried unplugging everything except motherboard, ram, cpu, video and hard drive?
That includes all cdrom's, floppy drives, usb, and whatever else you may have connected?
Running with bare minimum and seeing if that improves the post times at all? maybe one particular device is causing issues.
if it doesn't, well that just may very well be the POST time that motherboard needs.

Also i think you can turn off your boot logo to see if there are any post messages that may point you to the problem.

[snake.eyes]

I'd already swapped the MB for a DDR2 AM2+ board, also by Asrock. With the same components except memory, POST time is about 15 seconds and what is more of a worry, the Windows score is almost the same as the 880 with the memory (2x1 and 2x2GB DDR2 440MHx) being 7.2 istead of the 7.3 for DDR3. I'll swap back and check the bios for anything strange but the both boards were set to bios defaults with no overclocking.