News Which PC Boots Up and Shuts Down Faster: AMD or Intel?

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Intel called and needs another win. They gave Toms a choice of comparisons to run:
  1. CPU with longest part number.
  2. CPU best for home heating.
  3. CPU with most vulnerabilities patched.
  4. CPU with most mature node.
Even Toms is reluctant to be so obvious, and countered with "fastest boot time" which turned out OK. A win-win.
 
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madmatt30 said:
Probably the most pointless test ever in all fairness.

If you can't handle waiting 15 seconds to get into windows in a useable state there's something inherently wrong.

My xbox one takes longer to boot than that!
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You have to wait 15 seconds? thats a long time, mines between 5 to 10 seconds. lightening

 
Interesting decision to use Intel Oprane And not some more common and neutral SSD option... I wonder if Intel has some optimizations there.

Still test is pretty meaningless, considering it is done with far less common Oprane and not something like Samsung SSD which is far more common. Also makes me wonder how much effect motherboard actually had. Since it is very easy to use right thing to get results you want. So makes me wonder, is this actual comparison or just gift for Intel... And by all means, yes I tell dies some things better and could easily be more competitive, if they decided to adjust prices and remove some of that forced product segmentation. Like yes, 7nm is fancy new thing, but that is more enthusiast thing, not regular user thing.

But I can't get rid of feeling that something isn't done completely right here.
 
While I fully expected the Intel system to boot a bit faster, the test methodology seems rather lacking here...

In contrast, this series of tests is geared for what normal users would see in daily use with a minimally-tweaked system with stock hardware settings.
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Is the performance of a $2500 Optane boot drive really what normal users would see? The problem with using exotic storage like this is that it makes the BIOS initialization process account for a disproportionately large portion of the total boot time. That 40% to 50% difference in Windows boot times might look huge in the charts, but in reality what's shown here is only a 3.5 to 4.5 second difference. With a more typical SSD, those few seconds would almost certainly amount to a smaller percentage of the total boot time, especially in a real-world system with more processes loading at startup.

We outfitted both ASRock X570 and Z490 Taichi motherboards with similar mid-range CPUs.
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Similar in terms of core-count, but we're ultimately comparing a $300 Intel CPU against a $215 AMD CPU, going by current prices. That's an $85 price difference, and the Intel version of that board currently costs another $80 more as well, resulting in a not-at-all insignificant $165 price difference between the two. From a storage-performance perspective, that money could optionally be put toward more and faster SSD storage. And of course, the AMD system opens up the option of getting the most out of PCIe 4.0 drives, which are certainly a more realistic option than what was used for testing here.

Testing with that Optane drive might be fine for showing the maximum possible boot time differences with today's hardware, but for meaningful test results, there should have been testing using a handful of other drives as well. Good options would have been a PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive, a PCIe 3.0 NVMe drive, a SATA SSD, and maybe throw in a hard drive just for comparison's sake.

Different motherboards will also take different lengths of time to initialize, so it would have also been ideal to include a selection of different boards from more than one manufacturer and in different price segments. All this test really tells us is that ASRock's newer Z490 Taichi that they released a few months back boots faster than their X570 Taichi from almost a year prior. How about test some other boards including mid-range and lower-end models to give a better idea of the range of boot times one might expect across platforms?

With these more realistic and varied testing conditions, I suspect Intel would still come out a bit ahead on boot times in most cases, but the typical ratio between two might be smaller as well.
 
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cryoburner said:
While I fully expected the Intel system to boot a bit faster, the test methodology seems rather lacking here...


Is the performance of a $2500 Optane boot drive really what normal users would see? The problem with using exotic storage like this is that it makes the BIOS initialization process account for a disproportionately large portion of the total boot time. That 40% to 50% difference in Windows boot times might look huge in the charts, but in reality what's shown here is only a 3.5 to 4.5 second difference. With a more typical SSD, those few seconds would almost certainly amount to a smaller percentage of the total boot time, especially in a real-world system with more processes loading at startup.


Similar in terms of core-count, but we're ultimately comparing a $300 Intel CPU against a $215 AMD CPU, going by current prices. That's an $85 price difference, and the Intel version of that board currently costs another $80 more as well, resulting in a not-at-all insignificant $165 price difference between the two. From a storage-performance perspective, that money could optionally be put toward more and faster SSD storage. And of course, the AMD system opens up the option of getting the most out of PCIe 4.0 drives, which are certainly a more realistic option than what was used for testing here.

Testing with that Optane drive might be fine for showing the maximum possible boot time differences with today's hardware, but for meaningful test results, there should have been testing using a handful of other drives as well. Good options would have been a PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive, a PCIe 3.0 NVMe drive, a SATA SSD, and maybe throw in a hard drive just for comparison's sake.

Different motherboards will also take different lengths of time to initialize, so it would have also been ideal to include a selection of different boards from more than one manufacturer and in different price segments. All this test really tells us is that ASRock's newer Z490 Taichi that they released a few months back boots faster than their X570 Taichi from almost a year prior. How about test some other boards including mid-range and lower-end models to give a better idea of the range of boot times one might expect across platforms?

With these more realistic and varied testing conditions, I suspect Intel would still come out a bit ahead on boot times in most cases, but the typical ratio between two might be smaller as well.
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This is a little bit of what I wrote in a comment here :
"
I don't want apples to apples. I would like to see x470, b460, x570, b550, mini itx, m-atx full atx, Gigabyte, Asus, Asrock, Msi......

I am sorry one vendor and one chipset it is not enough.

With my once a month reboot this topic does not concern me but if you decided to open this pandora box at least add a little bit variety in my opinion........... "

This is one of the most unprofessional article that I have seen here and that says a lot.
 
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IME, it is the BIOS that wins. My DFI system would clear the BIOS almost immediately once proven stable.

Second is the CPU, which should mean Intel wins from their super fast ring bus.

OS should be Windows 10, as it will load straight to the desktop first, then load everything else making it appear quicker. instead of loading in everything first, before sending you to the desktop.

And yes it's important to me, and apparently to others as there is a lot of posters here. If they didn't care, they wouldn't post.
 
ViktorHJ said:
Do you?
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and, apparently, your clone:

rdmetz said:
Do you?
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Yes, which you'd both realize if you read the thread. So interesting that you both say the same thing (one with just a longer rant) and, in particular, @ViktorHJ 's account seems to be created just to troll this thread.


rdmetz said:
He's pointing out an obvious bias from a ton of people having a very hard time accepting their decision led to them not having the absolute best at everything setup.

The amount of reaching being done here is next level and the fact is ryzen isn't "better at everything" they just don't want to hear it.

That's if the thing even boots at all.

My friends with ryzen builds (1800x 2700x and 3700x) have all had problems getting their systems to post the first 2 seeing this issue continue on even to today.
(ranting snipped)
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You're right about reaching, but you're wrong about who's doing it.

Neither of you are contributing anything factual or useful here - just engaging in juvenile behavior screaming "LOLZ AMD SUX"

I mean, if you two have to fall back to mocking AMD as being inferior to Intel, and boot times is what you have to stand on for doing so, then you're really scrambling.


And, sorry, your "friends" who have trouble are anecdotal stories. Anecdotal stories from someone who's clearly showing that they're not trying to be helpful or informative, from builders of unknown skill, who are clearly so frustrated with their AMD builds that they continue to use them to this day.


EDIT: while @nings account seems to have been around for two years, apparently half of their (4 total) posts are in this thread, engaging in similar fanboyism.

EDIT 2: Apparently @lomien 's account also seems to be created for the purposes of trolling this thread.

I would not be surprised if the accounts ranting about how AMD "fanboys" are supposedly enraged by this (or whatever their point is) are actually only one or two people.
 
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King_V said:
Yes, which you'd both realize if you read the thread. So interesting that you both say the same thing (one with just a longer rant) and, in particular, @ViktorHJ 's account seems to be created just to troll this thread.

You're right about reaching, but you're wrong about who's doing it.

Neither of you are contributing anything factual or useful here - just engaging in juvenile behavior screaming "LOLZ AMD SUX"

I mean, if you two have to fall back to mocking AMD as being inferior to Intel, and boot times is what you have to stand on for doing so, then you're really scrambling.
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You are, unlike what you want people to perceive, not adding anything at all, you are going full ad hominem. And you are apparently unable to accept that boot time on Intels, systems are much, much, much faster, without thinking the people pointing said fact out are, scrambling/looking for clout.

King_V said:
And, sorry, your "friends" who have trouble are anecdotal stories. Anecdotal stories from someone who's clearly showing that they're not trying to be helpful or informative, from builders of unknown skill, who are clearly so frustrated with their AMD builds that they continue to use them to this day.
Click to expand...

If you honestly think that, then I guess I understand where you got the "builders of unknown skill", there is no need to project buddy. If you want non-anecdotal evidence, then how about you read the article you commented on.

For what it's worth, I am by no means a fanboy of AMD. I have owned an AMD GPU and CPU, an NVIDIA GPU and an Intel CPU. I have been happy with all of them, and I would not hesitate to buy from any brand if the perf/dollar is right.

"LOLZ AMD SUX" If this is what you got out of our posts, then I hold no hope, but in case you want to see reason, the sheer number of boot settings available on many Intel motherboards should probably clue you on to the fact that the reason Intel boots fast, is because Intel has spent significant R&D on boot times.
 
For those that think PCIe 4.0 x4 SSDs boot faster because of their sequential performance is so much faster than the PCIe 3.0 x4 Optane 905P, it's not quite true yet but close. Head to head Optane boots 0.2-0.3 seconds faster on average on AMD X570 platforms with Fast Boot enabled. Optane's random performance advantage makes up for the difference. It is minor, but NAND is still slower at boot. Things may change with the next-gen PCIe 4.0 SSDs though.
 
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seanwebster said:
For those that think PCIe 4.0 x4 SSDs boot faster because of their sequential performance is so much faster than the PCIe 3.0 x4 Optane 905P, it's not quite true yet but close. Head to head Optane boots 0.2-0.3 seconds faster on average on AMD X570 platforms. Optane's random performance advantage makes up for the difference. It is minor, but NAND is still slower at boot. Things may change with the next-gen PCIe 4.0 SSDs though.
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I wanted to add, for booting an OS, I would argue the higher IOPS is better, not the one who has the faster raw bandwidth. The stuff that gets loaded is all over the place on the drive in small files and they're not even loaded at once unless you're waking up from hibernating or Fast Boot. Which in that case, you're not even loading those files anymore.
 
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