Question Gigabyte Z390 Ultra boot failures and auto-boot issues

VarHyid

Honorable
Dec 30, 2014
7
0
10,510
I recently built a new PC and even though technically everything's working fine and it's perfectly stable once I'm in Windows 10, it sometimes has a boot failure and also sometimes boots itself.

Before I go into the details, I have to mention my daily boot routine (could be relevant). I power down my PC every day in the evening before going to sleep. It's connected to a basic surge protector which I'm also turning off so technically it's as if the PC is being physically disconnected from a power source. In the morning I turn on the surge protector, do my morning routine and then turn on the PC.

With my old system whenever I turned on the surge protector, my RGB keyboard would light up for a few seconds and that's it. With the new PC, just turning on the surge protector powers it up, I hear the fans and HDDs spinning up and usually after a few seconds, it would then power itself down again. This is already weird IMO because I am NOT pressing the power button on the PC so why would it power up just by plugging it in (as in - turning on the surge protector)?

All that said, this leads me to ISSUE #1 - today after it did its regular auto-power up, then power-down after a few seconds, it waited another maybe 15-20 seconds and then powered itself up once again... and this time it booted to Windows. All that without me pressing the power button on the PC, I just turned on the surge protector. How can this possibly happen and why?

Then there's the probably more important and equally weird ISSUE #2 - some days, I press the power button, the PC powers up, boots to Windows and that's it, no issues. Other days, it won't. Instead, it will show me a "Boot failure detected" window asking if I want to "Load optimized defaults then boot", "Load optimized defaults then reboot" or "Enter BIOS". It also says:

"The system has experienced a boot failure possibly due to incorrect configuration. Previous settings in BIOS may not be compatible with current hardware state.

Current CPU Speed: 4701.22 MHz
Current BCLK: 100.2 MHz
Current Memory Speed: 2400.57 MHz"

Here's the weird part - originally I suspected that this could be related to XMP so I would disable the XMP Profile 1, Save & Exit and it boots fine, but then I did some other experiments. One day I would switch to XMP Profile 2 (which clocks the RAM at 3000 MHz) and it still worked. Next I would turn XMP Profile 1 (which clocks the RAM at its max. 3200 MHz) on... and it would still work so I could even switch XMP off, then press DEL to enter BIOS before it tries to boot to Windows again and swap it back to Profile 1... and it would still work fine.

It almost looks like it doesn't matter what settings I use, just the fact that I make ANY change in the BIOS and "Save & Exit" will fix it for the current session and then it will boot to Windows just fine. Which brings me back to my daily power on/off routine. It seems that the only time this issue occurs is after the daily "cold boot". That's why I think those two issues could somehow be tied together. Could the PSU be bad? If so, why does it never go bad while in Windows, even when I play a game and it sucks more power? I never had any BSOD or crash while in Windows on this PC so far, so it seems stable. Also, I never did any actual overclocking (if you don't count XMP as overclocking), the only changes I made in BIOS were:
  • Enabling XMP Profile 1
  • Disabling on-board graphics
  • Disabling on-board audio
  • Enabling ErP (which lets the system consume less power in shutdown state (S5), so the keyboard wouldn't stay powered on before I even boot the PC)

I hope someone has any idea why this is happening. Last, but not least, the specs:

MoBo - Gigabyte Auros Z390 Ultra (BIOS version F7, as shipped; they only have one new update - F8, apparently it's only a microcode update for the Spectre/Meltdown stuff)
CPU - Intel Core i9-9900K
GPU - Gigabyte Aorus RTX 2080 Ti Xtreme
RAM - Kingston HyperX Predator 64 GB DDR4 (4 x 16 GB, HX432C16PB3A/16) sold as 3200 MHz (at XMP Profile 1)
PSU - Corsair RMX 850W, 80 Plus Gold
SSD1 - Samsung 970 Evo Plus M.2 250GB (for the OS + basic program files)
SSD2 - Kingston HyperX Savage 480GB
HDD1&2 - 2 x Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB each
 

VarHyid

Honorable
Dec 30, 2014
7
0
10,510
Yesterday I left the RAM at the default 2400MHz so XMP disabled to make sure that's not it and... it's not because today the PC turned itself on and off (without posting) 4 times before it finally posted.

When it did, I got a CMOS clear message saying that the BIOS has ben reset. I have no clue what's going on. I used the exact same setting I did before now and of course as always, it booted correctly to Windows, but I suspect tomorrow I'll have the same problem during the first "cold boot".
 

VarHyid

Honorable
Dec 30, 2014
7
0
10,510
In the last 4 days I didn't turn off the surge protector and under those circumstances the issue didn't occur so it seems to happen ONLY with "cold boot" when the PC is completely unplugged overnight. What can it be?

---EDIT---

And today it happened again even though I didn't turn off the surge protector :(
 
Last edited:

VarHyid

Honorable
Dec 30, 2014
7
0
10,510
Can anyone please help? Does anyone have ANY idea what the issue could be?

This is slowly getting scary as today the PC turned itself off and on about 8 times during the morning boot and it did that pretty quickly even while the mechanical HDDs were spinning.
 
Sorry no one has jumped in yet but it is not an issue I have come across. Based on your specs which are good all around, maybe it is worth double checking all your cables attached including the CPU power cables in the top left of the motherboard and the front panel header where your PC case power connects to...just in case. Then clearing the CMOS and running the optimised default setting and if all else fails then updating the BIOS.

fingers crossed others will jump in as well....
 
Jun 12, 2019
68
0
30
I recently built a new PC and even though technically everything's working fine and it's perfectly stable once I'm in Windows 10, it sometimes has a boot failure and also sometimes boots itself.

Before I go into the details, I have to mention my daily boot routine (could be relevant). I power down my PC every day in the evening before going to sleep. It's connected to a basic surge protector which I'm also turning off so technically it's as if the PC is being physically disconnected from a power source. In the morning I turn on the surge protector, do my morning routine and then turn on the PC.

With my old system whenever I turned on the surge protector, my RGB keyboard would light up for a few seconds and that's it. With the new PC, just turning on the surge protector powers it up, I hear the fans and HDDs spinning up and usually after a few seconds, it would then power itself down again. This is already weird IMO because I am NOT pressing the power button on the PC so why would it power up just by plugging it in (as in - turning on the surge protector)?

All that said, this leads me to ISSUE #1 - today after it did its regular auto-power up, then power-down after a few seconds, it waited another maybe 15-20 seconds and then powered itself up once again... and this time it booted to Windows. All that without me pressing the power button on the PC, I just turned on the surge protector. How can this possibly happen and why?

Then there's the probably more important and equally weird ISSUE #2 - some days, I press the power button, the PC powers up, boots to Windows and that's it, no issues. Other days, it won't. Instead, it will show me a "Boot failure detected" window asking if I want to "Load optimized defaults then boot", "Load optimized defaults then reboot" or "Enter BIOS". It also says:



Here's the weird part - originally I suspected that this could be related to XMP so I would disable the XMP Profile 1, Save & Exit and it boots fine, but then I did some other experiments. One day I would switch to XMP Profile 2 (which clocks the RAM at 3000 MHz) and it still worked. Next I would turn XMP Profile 1 (which clocks the RAM at its max. 3200 MHz) on... and it would still work so I could even switch XMP off, then press DEL to enter BIOS before it tries to boot to Windows again and swap it back to Profile 1... and it would still work fine.

It almost looks like it doesn't matter what settings I use, just the fact that I make ANY change in the BIOS and "Save & Exit" will fix it for the current session and then it will boot to Windows just fine. Which brings me back to my daily power on/off routine. It seems that the only time this issue occurs is after the daily "cold boot". That's why I think those two issues could somehow be tied together. Could the PSU be bad? If so, why does it never go bad while in Windows, even when I play a game and it sucks more power? I never had any BSOD or crash while in Windows on this PC so far, so it seems stable. Also, I never did any actual overclocking (if you don't count XMP as overclocking), the only changes I made in BIOS were:
  • Enabling XMP Profile 1
  • Disabling on-board graphics
  • Disabling on-board audio
  • Enabling ErP (which lets the system consume less power in shutdown state (S5), so the keyboard wouldn't stay powered on before I even boot the PC)
I hope someone has any idea why this is happening. Last, but not least, the specs:

MoBo - Gigabyte Auros Z390 Ultra (BIOS version F7, as shipped; they only have one new update - F8, apparently it's only a microcode update for the Spectre/Meltdown stuff)
CPU - Intel Core i9-9900K
GPU - Gigabyte Aorus RTX 2080 Ti Xtreme
RAM - Kingston HyperX Predator 64 GB DDR4 (4 x 16 GB, HX432C16PB3A/16) sold as 3200 MHz (at XMP Profile 1)
PSU - Corsair RMX 850W, 80 Plus Gold
SSD1 - Samsung 970 Evo Plus M.2 250GB (for the OS + basic program files)
SSD2 - Kingston HyperX Savage 480GB
HDD1&2 - 2 x Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB each
I have the same issue now. Have you managed to solve it?
 

VarHyid

Honorable
Dec 30, 2014
7
0
10,510
Well... I think I managed to kind of, sort of "solve" it.

I always suspected that this could be related to my RAM, but not because the RAM is bad, but because the board can't properly set it up at the "advertised" 3200 MHz clock speed so I watched some RAM overclocking videos and saw the exact same behavior in them - when the guy would power up the PC and the overclock was not set up correctly, it would go into some loops and the board might even turn itself off and back on a few times. Basically, it would fail to train the memory.

I also found out that even though the XMP profiles are supposed to be the "good" quick solution to get the advertised speed, they might not always be so at that point I decided to make some manual adjustments.

First, I noticed that even though the XMP profile clearly recommends using 1.35V on the RAM, the "Auto" setting on the board when the profile was enabled would still try to use the default 1.20V so I changed this manually to 1.35V. Next I manually entered the primary timings as recommended by the XMP profile as well as tRC. Next, I observed what settings the board used for RttNom , RttPark and RttWr when it booted up correctly and I locked those manually instead of leaving "Auto". Lastly, I enabled "RAM fast boot".

With all that, it's been I think 2 weeks with zero issues, at least not the real issues. Once every maybe 7 days the PC won't boot as fast as usual, goes through the cycle slower, but even then it doesn't power itself down so technically I consider this a "fix" although I'm sure if I locked some more of the "good" settings manually instead of leaving them on Auto, it probably would have helped even more so the PC wouldn't even go through the occasional slow boot.

One more note - I am now always keeping the surge protector on because the one time I did turn it off, the PC did go through a power-down loop once when I booted it up.

TL;DR - power down cycles can happen when RAM training fails, board seems to fail to find the right timings/settings despite XMP, settings RAM manually helps.
 
Jun 12, 2019
68
0
30
Well... I think I managed to kind of, sort of "solve" it.

I always suspected that this could be related to my RAM, but not because the RAM is bad, but because the board can't properly set it up at the "advertised" 3200 MHz clock speed so I watched some RAM overclocking videos and saw the exact same behavior in them - when the guy would power up the PC and the overclock was not set up correctly, it would go into some loops and the board might even turn itself off and back on a few times. Basically, it would fail to train the memory.

I also found out that even though the XMP profiles are supposed to be the "good" quick solution to get the advertised speed, they might not always be so at that point I decided to make some manual adjustments.

First, I noticed that even though the XMP profile clearly recommends using 1.35V on the RAM, the "Auto" setting on the board when the profile was enabled would still try to use the default 1.20V so I changed this manually to 1.35V. Next I manually entered the primary timings as recommended by the XMP profile as well as tRC. Next, I observed what settings the board used for RttNom , RttPark and RttWr when it booted up correctly and I locked those manually instead of leaving "Auto". Lastly, I enabled "RAM fast boot".

With all that, it's been I think 2 weeks with zero issues, at least not the real issues. Once every maybe 7 days the PC won't boot as fast as usual, goes through the cycle slower, but even then it doesn't power itself down so technically I consider this a "fix" although I'm sure if I locked some more of the "good" settings manually instead of leaving them on Auto, it probably would have helped even more so the PC wouldn't even go through the occasional slow boot.

One more note - I am now always keeping the surge protector on because the one time I did turn it off, the PC did go through a power-down loop once when I booted it up.

TL;DR - power down cycles can happen when RAM training fails, board seems to fail to find the right timings/settings despite XMP, settings RAM manually helps.
That's very similar to what's happening to me. I only enable XMP and get the boot failure message
 

VarHyid

Honorable
Dec 30, 2014
7
0
10,510
No updates. It's still happening to me, but very rarely now.

This was my first build with DDR4 memory (my previous PC still had DDR3) so I didn't realize that the advertised frequencies require overclocking. I thought when I buy 3200MHz memory, I'll get 3200MHz out of the box. Turns out it's 2400MHz and you can enable an overclocked XMP profile to get the "full" 3200MHz.

IMO this is borderline false advertising. Imagine Intel releasing the 9900K with "6GHz" mentioned on the box and in every description, you install it and it's only 4.2GHz unless you overclock it to 6GHz which may or may not be stable on some MoBos. People would freak out, there would be news abut this, but when it comes to memory, somehow it's OK to sell 3200MHz sticks that are actually 2400MHz, but the manufacturer binned them to run at 3200MHz... probably... hopefully.

I learned my lesson. Next time, when I want 3200MHz RAM, I'll probably have to buy 4200MHz sticks which will run at 3200MHz by default with no issues and no need to use XMP.
 
Apr 13, 2020
3
0
10
Yeah, it is stupid... I have searched a lot around the topic of RAM optimization. I do not have the same RAM as you, but what I have learned is that my XMP profile is optimized for a Ryzen CPU build.

My RAM is set to around 2111 MHz at default, which is obviously not good enough. I think I have to just try out different settings and see if it will work. Maybe I have to buy a new RAM-brick, who knows...
 
Sep 4, 2020
1
0
10
Same board I get exactly the same thing happening it loses all bios info after a cold boot. I have changed the BIOS battery twice to check its not that. I might try the memory settings as above because mine is 3000 so am using the XMP1 profile. Other than this is a it a faulty board?
 
Apr 13, 2020
3
0
10
I've managed to "fix" the problem by testing different memory settings inside bios. I had to do this manually, as the XMP1 profile didn't work and caused the blue screen or restarted the PC completely. I advise you to search on the internet about different memory settings you can apply for your RAM type. I'm not an expert, but was lucky with my result.. :)