Fastest booting motherboard?

[dguy6789]

Here's a question.

Does anyone know which motherboard for each socket(1366, 775, and AM3) can get through all of the post stuff and get straight to having the system load the OS the quickest? It's something I've been wondering about but it seems like no articles measure that for some reason. It's pretty important since the bios post screens can take as long as Windows itself takes to load on some motherboards.

 

[MalVeauX]

Heya,

No one measures it because it's not a very useful thing. If you need to boot a machine in seconds, you probably should just leave it on. OS's have sleep modes/hibernate. This prevents going through that boot process. They are loaded in less than 5 seconds that way. If you're shutting down the system completely and rebooting it from a dead cold every day and need it to be booted and ready for use in less than 10 seconds, you really should just explore different ways to power down: sleep, hibernate, or 24/7 low idle power etc.

Not to be a negative nancy or anything. I actually would be interested to see motherboards with better ways to boot since it seems so archaic how we do it still (slow clunky POST process).

Very best,

 

[dguy6789]

It's not that it's mission critical, I just want to know for curiosity's sake. The difference between a slow board and a fast board can be 10 seconds added to bootup time, so I want to know which is the quickest for a few of the platforms.

 

[TJCS]

ASRock currently have an instant-boot utility that can boots your system in 4 secs. Here is the demo and article.

 

[dguy6789]

That does look pretty cool. I wonder how fast it could boot if you turned your pc off and disconnected power for a while and then turned it back on.

 

[Loop2kil]

Not relevant to current setups but I once had a GA-7dx socket A board with an xp1700 that I swear could boot into windows xp in less than 20 seconds from the time I pressed the button.

 

[bigboxes]

Not the same as booting into Windows, but ASUS offers Express Gate. If you are in a hurry you can boot into Express Gate in five seconds to access the web, instant messaging, photos, etc. Personally, I just leave my pc on 24/7. Instant on.

 

[Rifter]

yeah express gate is cool, there are also other small linux distros that can boot really fast. However nothing is going to boot faster than sleep/suspend or leaving the comp on 24/7.

 

[lopri]

Boot time not only depends on hardware configuration but also on drivers and applications/services. Use Sleep and forget about booting! I don't remember when I last boot my systems..

 

[Claudius-07]

Disable all crap you don't need in BIOS... use an SSD for your OS... keep the OS clean with minimal garbage. My system boots me to my login screen at the same time my monitor finishes going through its "welcome"... "HDMI 1", etc. I used to leave it on 24/7, now I just don't bother.

Can't quite say it's a motherboard specific thing.. brand or whatnot -- just stuff that is getting initialized at the start, drivers being loaded, services started and the speed of access of your drive really. Hence my SSD.

 

[ExcaliburMM]

Wouldn't ASUS's express gate or similar technologies aid in this?

 

[dguy6789]

This is going to sound stupid from someone that's been here since late 2002, but is there some trick to waking the computer from sleep? Both my mouse and keyboard are USB and pressing keys and moving the mouse wouldn't wake my PC up. I am guessing I need it plugged into a PS/2 port?

Edit: The only options I found in my bios said they were to enable or disable PS/2 devices for waking the machine up from sleep. On a gamble I enabled them and my USB keyboard and mouse now wake the PC from sleep.

 

[Heidfirst]

Wouldn't ASUS's express gate or similar technologies aid in this?

MSI at least have an equivalent 9& I would expect |Gigabyte to have but I don't know).

& of course there are a few mobos with EFI BIOS rather than the traditional type.

 

[JAG87]

My computer boots in less than 1 second. It's called S3 sleep.