Reviews don't cover it because it's not a feature hardly anyone cares about..
I's probably a first on this forum..
Bottom line: Motherboards with fewest features enabled will POST the fastest.
Good luck with any great number of Z77 owners disabling everything on their board to get an answer for you ...
I doubt there will be a measurable difference between most ..
Thank-you to everybody who helped me out here, luckily though Anandtech have come to the rescue and have benchmarked POST times in their Z77 mobo roundup. This is awesome!
This is my backup plan, but my wife I and I both (geekily) quite like the bright blue LEDs . I will make the machine quieter if possible anyway, but losing the lights is not ideal.If your wife can't sleep with it on I assume its the noise because you can just unplug the LEDs. Have you ever thought about just getting quiet fans and then leaving it on all the time?
This is my backup plan, but my wife I and I both (geekily) quite like the bright blue LEDs . I will make the machine quieter if possible anyway, but losing the lights is not ideal.
There's also the issue of power consumption, power is only going to get more expensive , though this is of lesser concern.
btw, anybody posting feedback on how fast their board completes its POST is awesome and is making this thread very useful for future googlers of "Fastest POSTing motherboard"
I just timed my Gigabyte UD5H, and it was 13 seconds, but that is with everything turned on. I have not turned off components to speed it up.
TBH it is fast enough for me, in fact when I built this rig I was shocked at how fast boot up to desktop was. I barely looked away.
@Vegemeister: What exactly is S3 suspend?
When I sleep my current PC it remains as loud (not that loud though) as ever and all of the LEDs (some of them on the fans) are still lit up.
Also, I don't really want my PC to go back to how it was, I prefer to start up from scratch every now and again. If there was a way to write a script that would restart my PC and go into an S3 suspend (which might as well be off from what you are saying) that would actually be awesome. Otherwise I'm just buying the Asrock Z77 board .
I have the same motherboard, CPU and SSD as you, so I figured I'd time my bootup. This is only one run. I started the stopwatch as soon as I pressed the power switch.
From powering on to seeing the Windows loading graphic, right at 16 seconds when accounting for a quarter of a second of slow reflexes. I hit the lap button and then paused as soon as I had a mouse cursor on the desktop. That was 8.5 seconds.
POST - 16 seconds
Windows load - 8.5 seconds
Overall to desktop - 24.5 seconds
Probably takes the NIC to initialize another 1-2 seconds after hitting the desktop.