The first Zen 4 motherboard BIOS fixes are already here and the platform isn’t even out yet
ASRock has announced that it has created a post-launch BIOS that will decrease the previously too-long cold boot times.
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ASRock is out to put you mind at ease about reports of long boot times on itsAMD Ryzen 7000-seriesmotherboards. ASRock has informed us that it’s rectified a previous issue that meant cold boots could take up almost seven minutes. That’s an eternity in modern PC gaming.
ASRock X670E First boot/Full reset start Time required2x16GB≈100s2X32GB≈200s4X16GB≈200s4X32GB≈400sIs this the Zen 4 running a memory test on first boot? Or is this an ASRock issue?🤔 pic.twitter.com/4KvauCfVXaSeptember 1, 2022
This isn’t the C64 tape loading days, people. I don’t want to have time to go make a cup of delicious moka pot coffee while I wait for my rig to bloody turn on.
Luckily ASRock’s post-launch BIOS will decrease cold boot times on its five X670E motherboards. Though it hasn’t detailed quite how much shorter those new boot times will be, and it’s something that’s going to have to be part of a BIOS update once you actually get board in hand because they’re already out in retail ahead of the imminent launch alongside AMD’s new CPUs.
A completely cold boot of your PC can take a lot longer than just a simple restart, that’s a given, but last week’s leak of ASRock’s new AM5 X670E board highlighted that maybe its newZen 4 platformmight take a little longer than usual. And it seemed like it was mostly down to the DDR5 memory, too.
For a standard 2x 16GB set of DIMMs ASRock said it would previously take around 100 seconds for the first boot after the CMOS had been cleared—i.e. the system was completely disconnected from power for a time. But if you fully populated the X670E boards with four 32GB DDR5 DIMMs ASRock was estimating that it could take as much as 400 seconds for a cold boot.
That had people concerned, and it seemed it was also an ASRock issue, not an AMD AM5 issue. That has been born out by the motherboard maker now finding a way around the slow boot times.
“ASRock, has built new BIOS decreasing AM5 booting time. ASRock is dedicated to providing products with the best user-experience,” reads the statement sent to us. “The new BIOS providing better compatibility and shorter booting time has been built, and it will be available on ASRock website after product launch.”
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The motherboards affected are:
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Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he’s back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.
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