Z840 Boot Times

[g0tht3ch]

Hi all,

I've just acquired a Z840, having been looking for while.

This has 2 x Xeon 2699 v3 CPUs (so 36 cores/72 threads) and 192GB RAM) - and came with an nVidia Quadro M5000 (although I have a GTX1080 which I'm likely to put in, it's doing ok so far). It came with 3 SSDs - 1 x 1TB, 1 x 512GB and 1 x 256GB. No NVMe at this point.

I've upgraded the TPM to 2.0, BIOS to 2.59 and put a fresh copy of Win 10 Pro 64bit on, enabled Secure Boot and (AFAIK) got most things where they should be (PXE boot disabled, INTEL MEB/AMT disabled).

Boot times however, are "longer than I thought". As in a good couple of minutes from clicking power button to getting a desktop (it's like 20/30 seconds to get a screen response). Now, granted I've not (yet) disabled USB/CD etc boot (although have disabled network boot).

Is the 'not lightning' boot normal? I have an HP 8300 USDT which is ridiculously fast to boot/run, but I'd have thought the Z840 would be 'relatively nimble' to boot?

[stormsonweathers]

Hi all,

I've just acquired a Z840, having been looking for while.

This has 2 x Xeon 2699 v3 CPUs (so 36 cores/72 threads) and 192GB RAM) - and came with an nVidia Quadro M5000 (although I have a GTX1080 which I'm likely to put in, it's doing ok so far). It came with 3 SSDs - 1 x 1TB, 1 x 512GB and 1 x 256GB. No NVMe at this point.

I've upgraded the TPM to 2.0, BIOS to 2.59 and put a fresh copy of Win 10 Pro 64bit on, enabled Secure Boot and (AFAIK) got most things where they should be (PXE boot disabled, INTEL MEB/AMT disabled).

Boot times however, are "longer than I thought". As in a good couple of minutes from clicking power button to getting a desktop (it's like 20/30 seconds to get a screen response). Now, granted I've not (yet) disabled USB/CD etc boot (although have disabled network boot).

Is the 'not lightning' boot normal? I have an HP 8300 USDT which is ridiculously fast to boot/run, but I'd have thought the Z840 would be 'relatively nimble' to boot?

Most SATA SSDs are quite slow since some lack a RAM based cache, which maybe where your slowdown is coming from. Though SATA based SSDs are still a magnitude slower than NVme.
Can you list the brands of SSDs you have?

[frankr2994]

Hi all,

I've just acquired a Z840, having been looking for while.

This has 2 x Xeon 2699 v3 CPUs (so 36 cores/72 threads) and 192GB RAM) - and came with an nVidia Quadro M5000 (although I have a GTX1080 which I'm likely to put in, it's doing ok so far). It came with 3 SSDs - 1 x 1TB, 1 x 512GB and 1 x 256GB. No NVMe at this point.

I've upgraded the TPM to 2.0, BIOS to 2.59 and put a fresh copy of Win 10 Pro 64bit on, enabled Secure Boot and (AFAIK) got most things where they should be (PXE boot disabled, INTEL MEB/AMT disabled).

Boot times however, are "longer than I thought". As in a good couple of minutes from clicking power button to getting a desktop (it's like 20/30 seconds to get a screen response). Now, granted I've not (yet) disabled USB/CD etc boot (although have disabled network boot).

Is the 'not lightning' boot normal? I have an HP 8300 USDT which is ridiculously fast to boot/run, but I'd have thought the Z840 would be 'relatively nimble' to boot?

With that amount of memory boot times are never going to be fast. It does a check for the ecc memory on boot. mostly likely no bios options to enable fast boot to bypass those checks.

You say you have a fresh copy of win 10 installed. Do you have it in UEFI mode? sata Operation set to AHCI?

[g0tht3ch]

Secure Boot forces UEFI, so that's on (and confirmed via "System Information")
SATA is set to RAID mode, but no RAID configured.
I've disabled the NIC option ROMS as well but left the SAS one on for now.

On a side, the only other problem seems to be the "Intel(R) Management Engine Interface" device which starts ok when coming out of a full restart, but errors everytime the machine comes out of suspend/sleep - and gets :

"This device cannot start. (Code 10)

STATUS_DEVICE_POWER_FAILURE"

I've tried a couple of different drivers, re-enabled, cleared and disabled the Intel AMT in BIOS and it won't go away :\

[stormsonweathers]

Secure Boot forces UEFI, so that's on (and confirmed via "System Information")
SATA is set to RAID mode, but no RAID configured.
I've disabled the NIC option ROMS as well but left the SAS one on for now.

On a side, the only other problem seems to be the "Intel(R) Management Engine Interface" device which starts ok when coming out of a full restart, but errors everytime the machine comes out of suspend/sleep - and gets :

"This device cannot start. (Code 10)

STATUS_DEVICE_POWER_FAILURE"

I've tried a couple of different drivers, re-enabled, cleared and disabled the Intel AMT in BIOS and it won't go away :\

Try clearing the CMOS by removing the battery (it should look like a small coin) and unplug the power cord and leave it unplugged for about 5mins. reinsert the CMOS battery and power on. That should set everything back to factory default for the BIOS and it should boot up. If not you can try running the system with only 1 CPU (it may be possible one of the cpus could be at fault) and run the system with 2 - 4 sticks of RAM.

[g0tht3ch]

Sorted the Intel Management Interface, it was a firmware issue there.

Boot to BIOS, re-enable the Intel Management, then boot into Windows, run SP90102, reboot, then reboot back to BIOS, disable Intel Management again. Sorted.

Still got slowish boots but everything is working.

[Samir]

The HP bios should have an option for a faster boot, which will help somewhat, but when you have large amounts of ram it just takes time. My z420 with 256GB of ram (yes, 256GB--8x 32GB LRDIMMs) takes almost a minute or two before it boots (first time I thought the ram didn't take). And my z600 takes a bit even with just 16GB of ram vs it's max of 96GB.

Workstations take time to boot. I've never really understood the obsession with a computer needing to boot immediately anyways. I can boot, go grab something I need and it's up before I'm back usually--and this is with HDDs.