I have been messing around with my new Sandy Setup and this is one of the pesky issues that have annoyed me recently. I googled this and found that there’s a heap of users complaining about it on the internet. ASUS, ASRock, Gigabyte etc are all affected by it. This probably means that it has something to do with the chipset and not the board manufacturer. This is not an Overclocking tutorial, this is a fix only.
If you’ve reached this post then you already know what the issue is but if you don’t, well, here’s some detail on it.
P67 Motherboards tend to Double Boot on every cold start once you mess around with the Overclock settings. This could be any settings, as far as I’ve seen. If you change the CPU OC profiles or the DRAM OC profiles. One of them will cause the double boot to occur. Some people are a bit unlucky to have triple boots and it is definitely annoying as hell.
Now, I won’t go into details of what solutions others have provided for this problem. But I found that, it happens when my CPU BCLK is nudged over “100“. This is caused by using ASUS’s AI Suite II‘s built in Overclock Tuner or an Overclock profile. For my case, it was always nudged to “103“.
The DRAM frequency is also affected by the BCLK and you’ll see strange numbers as “1648” instead of “1600” or “1800” in the Bios profile. This is exactly what causes the Double and Triple boots. Well, at least for me.
Here’s teh solution that I’ve tried 3-4 times after messing around with the settings again and again and it works. Before you start, here’s a couple of things, you might wanna take note of.
- If your system is Overclocked and is stable, notice all the settings in the bios. If you’ve used an overclocking suite, like the one provided by ASUS, then you should note what settings it made in the bios. DRAM timings, CPU settings, Voltage etc.
- Upgrade your bios if you haven’t already. Should get this out of the way as well.
Let’s move on to the real deal:
- Go into your bios and load optimized defaults. This should reset the system to factory defaults.
- Save and reset system and then shutdown the system.
- Now reset your CMOS. You’ll need to consult your Motherboard’s Manual for that. Mine was at the back panel (ASUS).
- Once you’re done with that, start up your system and go into your bios.
- Find settings for “Onboard Devices” and look for “JMicron and Marvell” etc. You should see they have options under them called “Display OPROM” or “Display OptionROM in Boot“. Just disable those. All of them. You don’t need them for now.
- Move on to your CPU Overclock page and start entering values for overclocking. DO NOT CHANGE ANY OPTION FOR DRAM RIGHT NOW.
- While you’re entering OC settings, Make sure you never change the BCLK, Keep it “100″. That’ the gist of it.
- The Turbo or CPU Multiplier should be 45-50, depending on what processor you use and how much your system can Overclock.
- Once you’ve completely entered all of the Overclock settings. Save settings in bios and reset.
If your system is running fine, test your Overclocks. You can then return to the bios and change your DRAM profile. Notice that it should be a square number now. 1600, 1800, 2000, 2100 etc. Pick whatever you feel is suitable for you RAM. Enter the RAM timings, voltage etc and save settings in the bios.
Shutdown or restart the system and you shouldn’t have any more double or triple boots. Let me know if this works for you people or not as well.
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Cheers, it worked for me
Great! I guess, If I can hear more “works” about this from other people, I’ll work on patch or something and submit it to Asus or Intel.
Thanks this worked for me!
God bless you man!I was on a way of a nervous breakdown:) after a day of trying to find a solution for this double boot without success and then i found your blog.For me the solution was to set my memory from 1866 to 1600(even if they support 2000 with oc).That`s all i did and it worked:D.My motherboard is a MSI P67A-GD80.Thank you very much and all the best!
I’m glad it works for so many people. I sent an email to ASUS and Intel but never got a response. I hope they look into the issue and fix it in upcoming BIOS revisions.
Thank you so much! This is the most complete guide about this issue I could find, great job! I’ve been so frustrated at the lack of information and decent BIOS updates from Asus. The last two releases have been BETA, and they don’t go into detail about what was resolved. The Asus support forum is useless. A guide like this with step by step instructions is EXACTLY what Asus should have on their support site. I don’t think sending an e-mail to Asus is going to get anywhere, by the way. There’s a guy named Raja over on hardforum.com who works for Asus. He posts in this thread about BIOS releases – http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1578865&page=201&highlight=p7p55d – Some of the information he has is limited, but he’s more knowledgeable than regular tech support. Thanks again!
I had no idea how many people will actually find this post useful. But it’s a LOT. There are so many forums and sites redirecting this question to my blog and yet neither ASUS nor Intel Community support took notice.
You’re right, I never expected them to reply. I doubt Raja or community leaders will be able to do anything about it as well because these issues are related to first line support departments and related engineers. But I’ll drop him a PM.
I’m glad it works for all cases though. I’ve yet to hear that this solution didn’t work for someone with the issue. Which feels great!
To be honest, with the lack of all the support for the P8P67 motherboards, I was prepared to sell my P8P67 Deluxe and get Z68 made by someone else. This is the first PC I’ve actually built, and I chose Asus because I thought they were the best. I also bought an Asus laptop for my mom. Support and documentation for both devices has been absolutely horrible. Your guide here gave me hope, though! Have you gotten through to anyone?
Nope, I haven’t. Although, I don’t care. The internet is not limited. People can find the solution for almost anything without waiting on some big corporation’s support. The community finds solutions to every other problem and better.
Can’t believe I finally found the right fix. I followed this to a T, and my system booted straight to windows in one smooth post, whereas before it would triple post everytime. My ram frequency somehow changed itself to 1648 (was 1600) and BCLK was 103 instead of 100. I clicked the black CMOS reset on my back panel, disabled all Marvel and Jmicron options, set ram to 1600. Thank you!
That’s just great. ASUS has been the worst experience in terms of product support so far for me. This issue has still not been resolved in the latest bioses.
Glad it worked for you.