Motherboard problem?

Nem · September 30, 2015

So I've had my computer for about a year now and I never really got around to taking a look at this because it never seemed like a big issue at the time, but I feel like there may be something wrong with my computer. Specs:

OS: Windows 8.1

CPU: Intel i7 5820k

Motherboard: Asus X99-A

Memory: 32GB G.Skill Ripjaws 4 (DDR4-2133)

Hard Drive: Crucial MX100 256GB (Boot)

Hard Drive: Samsung 840 128GB

Graphics Card: Asus GTX970 Strix OC

PSU: EVGA Supernova 750W G2

Boot time is fairly slow. It sits through the initial post and windows loading screen process for about 1minute (2minutes on bad days). This doesn't seem like a long time, but my 5 year old i5 machine hits the desktop in about 10 seconds from pushing the power button.

Occasionally the machine won't restart and will just stay on the "Restarting..." screen until I manually hit the reset button. Sometimes I have the same problem with shutting down as well.

There will be occasional crashes and BSOD when I'm playing games.

None of these are major issues, but mild annoyances that I don't experience on any other computer.

I had the CPU OC'ed to about 4.5GHz and that was when I was seeing A LOT of these issues. I put that down to too high of an OC, backed it down to 4.2GHz and the restart/shut down and BSOD issues happen much more infrequently - maybe once every 2-3 weeks. However, the boot/restart/shutdown times are still very slow (as described above)

I don't believe this is an instability issue, because the CPU doesn't run too hot under load (40-50C), and 4.2GHz should be well within the OC range for this CPU

I have tried removing sticks of RAM and testing each stick individually and I get the same problems

I can't change out any of the other components as I don't have any spare components lying around to test with.

Each individual component seems to be working OK. memtest on the RAM is fine, I can see my CPU cores are being pushed when I do various things, I can play games at max res so the gfx card probably isn't an issue. The only thing that I don't have a way to test directly is the motherboard - could that be an issue here?

What can I do to further diagnose this issue?