Gigabyte Z390 Ultra boot failures and auto-boot issues

[VarHyid]

I recently built a new PC and even though technically everything's working fine and it's perfectly stable once I'm in Windows 10, it sometimes has a boot failure and also sometimes boots itself.

 

Before I go into the details, I have to mention my daily boot routine (could be relevant). I power down my PC every day in the evening before going to sleep. It's connected to a basic surge protector which I'm also turning off so technically it's as if the PC is being physically disconnected from a power source. In the morning I turn on the surge protector, do my morning routine and then turn on the PC.

 

With my old system whenever I turned on the surge protector, my RGB keyboard would light up for a few seconds and that's it. With the new PC, just turning on the surge protector powers it up, I hear the fans and HDDs spinning up and usually after a few seconds, it would then power itself down again. This is already weird IMO because I am NOT pressing the power button on the PC so why would it power up just by plugging it in (as in - turning on the surge protector)?

 

All that said, this leads me to ISSUE #1 - today after it did its regular auto-power up, then power-down after a few seconds, it waited another maybe 15-20 seconds and then powered itself up once again... and this time it booted to Windows. All that without me pressing the power button on the PC, I just turned on the surge protector. How can this possibly happen and why?

 

Then there's the probably more important and equally weird ISSUE #2 - some days, I press the power button, the PC powers up, boots to Windows and that's it, no issues. Other days, it won't. Instead, it will show me a "Boot failure detected" window asking if I want to "Load optimized defaults then boot", "Load optimized defaults then reboot" or "Enter BIOS". It also says:

 

Quote

 

"The system has experienced a boot failure possibly due to incorrect configuration. Previous settings in BIOS may not be compatible with current hardware state.

 

Current CPU Speed: 4701.22 MHz

Current BCLK: 100.2 MHz

Current Memory Speed: 2400.57 MHz"

 

 

Here's the weird part - originally I suspected that this could be related to XMP so I would disable the XMP Profile 1, Save & Exit and it boots fine, but then I did some other experiments. One day I would switch to XMP Profile 2 (which clocks the RAM at 3000 MHz) and it still worked. Next I would turn XMP Profile 1 (which clocks the RAM at its max. 3200 MHz) on... and it would still work so I could even switch XMP off, then press DEL to enter BIOS before it tries to boot to Windows again and swap it back to Profile 1... and it would still work fine.

 

It almost looks like it doesn't matter what settings I use, just the fact that I make ANY change in the BIOS and "Save & Exit" will fix it for the current session and then it will boot to Windows just fine. Which brings me back to my daily power on/off routine. It seems that the only time this issue occurs is after the daily "cold boot". That's why I think those two issues could somehow be tied together. Could the PSU be bad? If so, why does it never go bad while in Windows, even when I play a game and it sucks more power? I never had any BSOD or crash while in Windows on this PC so far, so it seems stable. Also, I never did any actual overclocking (if you don't count XMP as overclocking), the only changes I made in BIOS were:

• Enabling XMP Profile 1
• Disabling on-board graphics
• Disabling on-board audio
• Enabling ErP (which lets the system consume less power in shutdown state (S5), so the keyboard wouldn't stay powered on before I even boot the PC)

I hope someone has any idea why this is happening. Last, but not least, the specs:

 

MoBo - Gigabyte Auros Z390 Ultra (BIOS version F7, as shipped; they only have one new update - F8, apparently it's only a microcode update for the Spectre/Meltdown stuff)

CPU - Intel Core i9-9900K

GPU - Gigabyte Aorus RTX 2080 Ti Xtreme

RAM - Kingston HyperX Predator 64 GB DDR4 (4 x 16 GB, HX432C16PB3A/16) sold as 3200 MHz (at XMP Profile 1)

PSU - Corsair RMX 850W, 80 Plus Gold

SSD1 - Samsung 970 Evo Plus M.2 250GB (for the OS + basic program files)

SSD2 - Kingston HyperX Savage 480GB

HDD1&2 - 2 x Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB each

 

PS. Yesterday I left the RAM at the default 2400MHz so XMP disabled to make sure that's not it and... it's not because today the PC turned itself on and off (without posting) 4 times before it finally posted.

When it did, I got a CMOS clear message saying that the BIOS has ben reset. I have no clue what's going on. I used the exact same setting I did before now and of course as always, it booted correctly to Windows, but I suspect tomorrow I'll have the same problem during the first "cold boot".

[VarHyid]

In the last 4 days I didn't turn off the surge protector and under those circumstances the issue didn't occur so it seems to happen ONLY with "cold boot" when the PC is completely unplugged overnight. What can it be?

 

---EDIT---

 

And today it happened again even though I didn't turn off the surge protector

[VarHyid]

Can anyone please help? Does anyone have ANY idea what the issue could be?

 

This is slowly getting scary as today the PC turned itself off and on about 8 times during the morning boot and it did that pretty quickly even while the mechanical HDDs were spinning.

[VarHyid]

HELP!

 

Has no one really ever experienced an issue like this? I already contacted Gigabyte's support, but they're absolutely useless. After the first week of waiting they didn't even address my question and after the next week of waiting they asked me for the brand of the PSU which I already mentioned as I originally created the support ticket. Basically, there's no support from Gigabyte as far as I'm concerned

[Oluf]

I also have the excact problem like you have! Can someone please help with this issue?