Long system POST times due to VGA LED on MSI motherboard

[n0stalghia]

Recently, my PC suddenly started taking a long time to boot (~2 minutes instead of ~10 seconds). Upon further investigation I found out that the VGA LED is glowing on the motherboard for more than a minute, and then it turns off and the system proceeds to boot normally. According to the manual, this "indicates GPU is not detected or fail". I do not think I changed any BIOS settings recently, except enabling resizable BAR support. I did try to turn it off again, but it didn't fix my issue. I don't think that the issue appeared immediately after it either, so this is likely more of a coincidence anyway. The system has been in use in this hardware configuration for a full year, with motherboard/GPU being two years old and CPU/SSD being 6 months old.

 

Motherboard is an MSI X570-A Pro. I've checked and it is running the latest available BIOS version 7C37vHI. Graphics card is a Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3070 Gaming OC, I've been using it for almost two yeas now and it has not had any issues in any games or machine learning tasks. 

 

The system boot goes as follows:
1. I press the power on button

2. The system powers on and starts to POST (about 1s)

3. The GPU LED on the motherboard starts glowing, indicating GPU not detected or fail. In this state, the system waits (idles?) for more than a minute (I've measured it with a stopwatch and clocked 66 seconds)

4. The GPU LED turns off, the system proceeds to POST (1s) and boot to Windows log in screen normally (takes about 5s)

5. Windows log in screen shows, I can log in. No GPU errors during gaming/machine learning tasks.

 

Hardware configuration:

 

MSI X570-A Pro motherboard, latest BIOS 7C37vHI

Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3070 Gaming OC

Ryzen 7 5800X3D

NZXT C850 PSU

Samsung 980 Pro 1TB SSD
Secure boot is off

Resizable BAR support is off

 

Has anyone encountered anything similar? Any tips on how to fix the problem? The PC is technically completely usable and stable, but waiting more than a minute for it to boot every day is not fun.

[DoctorNick]

RAM speed? Is secure boot enabled?

Edit: Try turning of PSU. Remove memory for 2 min. Reseat the GPU and memory. If this doesn't work. Clear CMOS. Make sure that no OC is applied. Try booting without DOCP/XMP enabled.

@n0stalghia

[n0stalghia]

2 hours ago, DoctorNick said:

RAM speed? Is secure boot enabled?

Edit: Try turning of PSU. Remove memory for 2 min. Reseat the GPU and memory. If this doesn't work. Clear CMOS. Make sure that no OC is applied. Try booting without DOCP/XMP enabled.

@n0stalghia

Secure boot is disabled, as per original post. RAM is at 3600, "stock" XMP profile without any custom overclocking. I'll try the CMOS and removing GPU/memory.

[DoctorNick]

5 minutes ago, n0stalghia said:

Secure boot is disabled, as per original post. RAM is at 3600, "stock" XMP profile without any custom overclocking. I'll try the CMOS and removing GPU/memory.

I see. Didn't see. But why? Try auto ram speeds instead of xmp/docp. 

[n0stalghia]

Feeling guilty to necro an old thread, but it has to be done due to xkcd 979.

 

Not sure what the problem was, but removing the CMOS battery and re-inserting it again fixed the issue. Then I updated the BIOS to a newer version just in case, and the problem did not reappear. So all is good.

 

RAM speed, Secure Boot, etc., were not a factor. After CMOS clear I tried booting with several variations of those settings, the problem did not reappear.