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Dear ASROCK gurus:
I recently built a new rig based on the Z87E-ITX (full specs at the end). I have owned it for almost a month now. I encountered the following problems (first one being the most annoying so far):
A. The system would not cold boot:
Simply, the machine won't start from cold boot. I could see the ASROCK Splash logo, and the UEFI options ("Press F2 or Del to UEFI setting, press F11 to Boot options ....") but after the UEFI options faded away, the machine would turn off (the power LED on the case was completely off). No matter how many times I tried to turn on again, the machine would keep doing this endlessly.
The only way to boot successfully is to press any of the keys as suggested on the options: F2 to UEFI settings, F11 to boot options, etc., then after allowing it to proceed as such the machine would finally boot.
This affects normal ("disabled" fast boot), "Fast", and "Ultra Fast" boot modes all the same.
If the machine was just turned off, within a few minutes this problem wouldn't occur. However, after being off for more than a few minutes this would happen. Because of this behavior, I suspected it had something to do with volatile memory (e.g. DRAM or any RAM-based storage) since volatile memory can hold its charge up to a few minutes. On the other hand, I did not see any settings to be altered in UEFI so I am not sure whether this argument is valid. Another thing I can think of would be UEFI bugs.
Restarting from Windows ("Warm boot") would not result in this problem either. Waking up from Hibernation, if the machine was put to hibernation for a while, would cause the same issue.
B. The system couldn't recognize UEFI GOP-complaint VBIOS (reliably at least):
I flashed my VBIOS of the add-on video card (an MSI GTX760) trying to enable the ultra fast boot. When it worked (or at least when I thought it worked) I could see the ASROCK Splash icon displayed in the monitor's native 1920x1200 resolution, different from otherwise (normal or fast boot) when it was displayed at VGA 640x480 resolution. However, it only worked intermittently. When it failed, it seemed to be the same as problem A., that it happened more often in cold boot. The ASROCK splash logo would disappear, then an error message would pop up saying the VBIOS did not conform to UEFI GOP and I could choose to either proceed by pressing F1 (and the UEFI would automatically change the boot mode to "Fast"; I verified it afterwards), or pressing F2/Del to enter UEFI (to do the same thing anyways). MSI support team said it has to do with the motherboard's UEFI implementation. I suspect this has the same root of problems as the first issue above. Is there any suggestion?
I have contacted the support at ASROCK but so far only got response regarding problem B, saying they are investigating and suggesting me to try another video card (which I don't have the luxury of), and haven't heard anything about the problem A (only automated reply message back to me). Aside from these two, the system works pretty well once booted, and I have tried a few stress tests without major issues. There are some other minor things that I can live with so I won't crowd this post with them.
My setup:
ASROCK Z87E-ITX UEFI Ver. 2.30: came with it, also a sticker on the box saying "New Version"
Xeon 1245v3 @ 3.4 GHz: disabled all core enhancement, enabled all power-saving features except for "C package".
ADATA XPG 1.0 (XMP profile 1.3) DDR3-1600 2x8GiB @ 9-9-9-24, had to manually select the XMP 1.3 profile to correctly time it as DDR3-1600 (by default the UEFI made it DDR3-1333)
SATA_0: Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB SSD, set as "Solid state drive" in UEFI, AHCI boot, GPT partitioned, 3 partitions created by Windows 8.1 x64 installer.
SATA_1: Seagate SSHD 2TB, set as "Hard disk drive" in UEFI, GPT partitioned, one partition.
SATA_4: LG 14X BD-RE
Seasonic 520W Platinum silent modular PSU
Zalman CNPS 8900 Silent CPU cooler
Cooler Master Elite 130
Windows 8.1 Pro x64 was installed fresh (with both SSD and SSHD brand new), under UEFI Fast boot, partitioned to use the entire drive in both drives under GPT theme, and all drivers were downloaded from ASROCK website before installation.
Thanks!
I recently built a new rig based on the Z87E-ITX (full specs at the end). I have owned it for almost a month now. I encountered the following problems (first one being the most annoying so far):
A. The system would not cold boot:
Simply, the machine won't start from cold boot. I could see the ASROCK Splash logo, and the UEFI options ("Press F2 or Del to UEFI setting, press F11 to Boot options ....") but after the UEFI options faded away, the machine would turn off (the power LED on the case was completely off). No matter how many times I tried to turn on again, the machine would keep doing this endlessly.
The only way to boot successfully is to press any of the keys as suggested on the options: F2 to UEFI settings, F11 to boot options, etc., then after allowing it to proceed as such the machine would finally boot.
This affects normal ("disabled" fast boot), "Fast", and "Ultra Fast" boot modes all the same.
If the machine was just turned off, within a few minutes this problem wouldn't occur. However, after being off for more than a few minutes this would happen. Because of this behavior, I suspected it had something to do with volatile memory (e.g. DRAM or any RAM-based storage) since volatile memory can hold its charge up to a few minutes. On the other hand, I did not see any settings to be altered in UEFI so I am not sure whether this argument is valid. Another thing I can think of would be UEFI bugs.
Restarting from Windows ("Warm boot") would not result in this problem either. Waking up from Hibernation, if the machine was put to hibernation for a while, would cause the same issue.
B. The system couldn't recognize UEFI GOP-complaint VBIOS (reliably at least):
I flashed my VBIOS of the add-on video card (an MSI GTX760) trying to enable the ultra fast boot. When it worked (or at least when I thought it worked) I could see the ASROCK Splash icon displayed in the monitor's native 1920x1200 resolution, different from otherwise (normal or fast boot) when it was displayed at VGA 640x480 resolution. However, it only worked intermittently. When it failed, it seemed to be the same as problem A., that it happened more often in cold boot. The ASROCK splash logo would disappear, then an error message would pop up saying the VBIOS did not conform to UEFI GOP and I could choose to either proceed by pressing F1 (and the UEFI would automatically change the boot mode to "Fast"; I verified it afterwards), or pressing F2/Del to enter UEFI (to do the same thing anyways). MSI support team said it has to do with the motherboard's UEFI implementation. I suspect this has the same root of problems as the first issue above. Is there any suggestion?
I have contacted the support at ASROCK but so far only got response regarding problem B, saying they are investigating and suggesting me to try another video card (which I don't have the luxury of), and haven't heard anything about the problem A (only automated reply message back to me). Aside from these two, the system works pretty well once booted, and I have tried a few stress tests without major issues. There are some other minor things that I can live with so I won't crowd this post with them.
My setup:
ASROCK Z87E-ITX UEFI Ver. 2.30: came with it, also a sticker on the box saying "New Version"
Xeon 1245v3 @ 3.4 GHz: disabled all core enhancement, enabled all power-saving features except for "C package".
ADATA XPG 1.0 (XMP profile 1.3) DDR3-1600 2x8GiB @ 9-9-9-24, had to manually select the XMP 1.3 profile to correctly time it as DDR3-1600 (by default the UEFI made it DDR3-1333)
SATA_0: Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB SSD, set as "Solid state drive" in UEFI, AHCI boot, GPT partitioned, 3 partitions created by Windows 8.1 x64 installer.
SATA_1: Seagate SSHD 2TB, set as "Hard disk drive" in UEFI, GPT partitioned, one partition.
SATA_4: LG 14X BD-RE
Seasonic 520W Platinum silent modular PSU
Zalman CNPS 8900 Silent CPU cooler
Cooler Master Elite 130
Windows 8.1 Pro x64 was installed fresh (with both SSD and SSHD brand new), under UEFI Fast boot, partitioned to use the entire drive in both drives under GPT theme, and all drivers were downloaded from ASROCK website before installation.
Thanks!
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