Why does my ASUS P9X79 WS keep turning itself off and on at initial start button press?

[Noel 4,499]

This is a refurbished board after I sent my 4 y/o P9X79 WS in as it finally gave up the ghost, and since installing parts into the replacement board every time I start up from cold it will keeping cycling on and off which seems like maybe it is testing different auto-configurations until it finds one that will support my default overclock which is to 4.3Ghz.  The board came w/ a newer BIOS, but FWIW my old board and BIOS never did this.  So boot-ups take much longer now up to 2-3 minutes, though it remains rock solid and cool at 4.3Ghz, easily o'clocks to 4.42 at 1.32v and remain cool.  I looked in the motherboard manual that came w/ the board and couldn't see what might be doing this.  EPU is enabled, TPU is disabled.  

Any suggestions as to how to ameliorate the long slow boot up test sequence would be greatly appreciated!

[jmig 100]

On 10/16/2017 at 1:50 PM, Noel said:

This is a refurbished board after I sent my 4 y/o P9X79 WS in as it finally gave up the ghost, and since installing parts into the replacement board every time I start up from cold it will keeping cycling on and off which seems like maybe it is testing different auto-configurations until it finds one that will support my default overclock which is to 4.3Ghz.  The board came w/ a newer BIOS, but FWIW my old board and BIOS never did this.  So boot-ups take much longer now up to 2-3 minutes, though it remains rock solid and cool at 4.3Ghz, easily o'clocks to 4.42 at 1.32v and remain cool.  I looked in the motherboard manual that came w/ the board and couldn't see what might be doing this.  EPU is enabled, TPU is disabled.  

Any suggestions as to how to ameliorate the long slow boot up test sequence would be greatly appreciated!

This could be a tough one. When I have had similar experiences, it was either a usb device that wasn't playing well, or the overclock settings. You might try going back to default CMOS settings and see if it boots normally. If not, disconnect all your usb devices and try booting again. If that works, use the old but sucky technique of plugging in one usb at a time until it reverts back to the searching behavior.

If none of that works, I am afraid that I can't help you any further. Maybe someone else knows?

[Noel 4,499]

Good thoughts thanks John I will absolutely try those things and post results one way or the other.  

[vortex681 806]

On 16/10/2017 at 7:50 PM, Noel said:

Any suggestions as to how to ameliorate the long slow boot up test sequence would be greatly appreciated!

It might be completely different but I had what sounds like a similar problem with my Asus board in a new build last year. It would go into a loop during boot and would take some time to get to the OS (occasionally not even getting that far). I had my SSD boot drive in the first position on the boot priority list in the BIOS. After several days of troubleshooting, I changed the order so that one of my none-boot hard drives had a higher priority than the boot drive and this solved the problem – no idea why and it didn't seem to add anything to the boot time. Got to be worth a try.

[Noel 4,499]

Good thought vortex I will give that a try too.  Thanks!

[Noel 4,499]

And the winner goes to....Vortex681!  Thanks a lot that was essentially it, or related to what you suggested at least.   I just needed to tell the BIOS at least one or the other or both of these two changes I found in the BOOT menu in the BIOS, 1,  Initialize ALL SATA devices during POST instead of only the boot device which was how I had it.  And 2, I needed to assign my primary drive correctly.  Probably just #2 but not sure.   No wonder it couldn't decide what to do!  Anyway, all's well now.

Thanks again all ;o)

[vortex681 806]

Great news! Go flying.

[jmig 100]

Well, at least I came in second.   I am glad you solved your issue. They can be taxing at times.

 

[Noel 4,499]

22 minutes ago, jmig said:

They can be taxing at times.

Indeed!  There are so many tiny issues that can create headaches this has left me with a strong desire not to change anything when it's all working well!   I won't do incremental upgrades to P3D when they appear, in fact I haven't yet upgraded from V3.0 because it all works real well!  Plus, w/ so many 3rd party apps that haven't done the conversion I have zero interest in what seems mostly like almost imperceptible improvements that one sees in V4 over V3, but I surely will upgrade as soon as another major component fails in my hardware.   Seems like the new 8700K plus a 1080Ti would yield some nice improvements for me, but alas my sys still cuts it now despite being 5 y/o.  I fly almost daily too it's amazing it's lasted this long.