This is what my Quad MSI GeForce GTX 1070 AERO 8G OCs do when I boot Windows 7: Youtube Video

I see the post screen and then after the Windows logo I get a black screen, my monitors go to sleep, and at least 5 minutes pass. During the Time Of Blackness I know that my keyboard was initialized because the lights came on but tapping capslock does nothing so I don't think it's actually talking to the PC.

Finally, if I wait long enough and don't panic and press the reset switch: Windows rises from the dead and I'm in (fast forward in the video to the end).

For months I've had Dual MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti Gaming 6Gs in the same machine and they boot instantly: Windows logo disappears and I get the login screen immediately.

Before that I tried Dual MSI GeForce GTX 1070 8Gs and had this same problem. This was without bridge, with ribbon SLI bridge and with HB Bridge.

At that time I tried a bunch of different driver versions, DDU clean-installs, and spent hours scouring my BIOS for things to turn off.

Back then when I took one card out and ran with just a single 1070 it booted instantly. I eventually gave up and returned the cards assuming there was some defect that prevented them from playing together.

In another PC I have Triple MSI GeForce GTX GTX 1070 AERO 8G OCs (same card as in video) and they are screaming along without any problems.

I don't think it's a PSU problem because the 980 Ti's draw about the same under load (and I was able to reproduce it with only two 1070's with even less draw). Also, once I'm booted in I can cook the crap out of these cards full-blast for many hours at a time with no problems (despite what should be 600W TDP these 4 cards actually load my PSU about the same as the twin 980 Tis which should be 100W less).

In this video I put the clock up so that I could correlate the Windows Event View with the login-screen appearing; in my log the last even is:

"Intel Ethernet Connection 2 I218-V Network link has been established at 1Gbps full duplex."

Then there's roughly a delay roughly the same as the blackout, then

"The Plug and Play service entered the running state."

Followed by the usual info logs you get when Windows boots.

The only error is benign: "The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) failed to load: cdrom" and I was getting that before so I don't think that's it.

Snapshot of the event view: imgur

It's all quite baffling!

I have an odd problem also, probably related. Numbering the long PCIe slots on my MB from nearest to the CPU as 1, then 2, then 3. I have 1080 in slot 3 and 2 750ti in slots 1 and 2. If I boot with monitor plugged into the 750ti in slot 1, all is normal. If I plug monitor into 1080 (only monitor) NOTHING. Just a black screen.

Normally (no 1080) I can boot off of whatever GPU I plug into, in any slot.

Perhaps the next time I try it I should wait for 5-10 minutes, to see if it boots up.

Maybe this is a quirk in the 10-series cards? Or the drivers? (I was using 368.nn, don't exactly remember which).

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You might need Process Monitor to log the boot & see just what is (or isn't) happening.

There have been issues with Win10 in particular (and some older OSs) on laptops that have Nvidia or AMD graphics in addition to the on die Intel graphics with the OS during boot going to a black screen that can last for 30s- to a minute or so as the OS is initialising the drivers for each video hardware.
Often disabling one of the video "cards" results in the usual black screen during boot of only a few seconds.

Whether your issue is related to this I don't know. And why it should have an issue with 2 cards of the same manufacturer, and of the same hardware I couldn't say.
Most likely some weird problem relating to the BIOS, PCIe lanes used, and hardware I/O addresses & IRQs & system memory. In other words- really, really ugly. With a 64bit OS it shouldn't happen.

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Grant
Darwin NT

You might need Process Monitor to log the boot & see just what is (or isn't) happening.

That's pretty nifty -- I had no idea it could do that! Thank you for the suggestion -- I'll check it out.

You might need Process Monitor to log the boot & see just what is (or isn't) happening.

That's pretty nifty -- I had no idea it could do that! Thank you for the suggestion -- I'll check it out.

When you set it up, I highly recommend specifying a Backing File for the output (File>Backing files). Process Monitor's default is to just use virtual memory. I've been caught by that a couple times when I forgot, closed Process Monitor, and promptly lost all my logging.

Is there an Aux 4 pin molex plug on your motherboard that you have missed?
For boards that support 3/4 way cards theres an Aux connection on the M/B.

Have your disabled "Windows Fast Startup" in the Power options?

1) Go to Power Options
2) Click “Choose what the power buttons do” on the left side of the window.
3) Click “Change settings that are currently unavailable.”
4) Under “Shutdown settings” uncheck “Turn on fast startup”.

1) Go to Power Options
2) Click “Choose what the power buttons do” on the left side of the window.
3) Click “Change settings that are currently unavailable.”
4) Under “Shutdown settings” uncheck “Turn on fast startup”.

In Win7 I do 1,2 and 3. There is no "Turn on fast startup" item, only a choice for setting a password.

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ah right for some reason i thought he was on Windows 10. I misread the top part of his post.

Is there an Aux 4 pin molex plug on your motherboard that you have missed?
For boards that support 3/4 way cards theres an Aux connection on the M/B.

Thank you for the suggestion but I'd had that hooked up for a while now (I'm not sure if it was necessary for just 2 980 Ti's but I made sure it was all set up for them).

1) Go to Power Options
2) Click “Choose what the power buttons do” on the left side of the window.
3) Click “Change settings that are currently unavailable.”
4) Under “Shutdown settings” uncheck “Turn on fast startup”.

In Win7 I do 1,2 and 3. There is no "Turn on fast startup" item, only a choice for setting a password.

There usually is a fast boot option in the latest BIOS. Also turn off any fullscreen MB logo posting. I just have a 5 second POST notice and that's it. This on Windows 7 64 bit. The Win 10 machine has the faster startup though checking the same amount of memory as the Win 7 machines.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

There usually is a fast boot option in the latest BIOS. Also turn off any fullscreen MB logo posting. I just have a 5 second POST notice and that's it. This on Windows 7 64 bit. The Win 10 machine has the faster startup though checking the same amount of memory as the Win 7 machines.

All the motherboards I ever used had a "fast boot" option. I don't think that the OS has anything to do with that. Once it goes to the disk, the BIOS is out of the loop; it's running code...and this is a new phenomenon, that occurs only with 10x0 cards, so far as this thread says. And if the problem is pre-OS, then there is a problem with the cards interacting with the PC..I'm so confused...

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I did bit of investigation this afternoon:

1) Disabling Fast Boot *in BIOS* didn't help me. I fiddled with a few other things in there but nothing made any difference.

2) Process Monitor event log was pretty interesting; from the Registry var access pattern I could see it doing stuff for each card and then for each extra card past the first one there would be a flurry of activity followed by a 1.5 to 2 minute jump in the log. I could tell it was doing NVidia driver stuff because of the reg-key names and nothing else was going on in that interval.

I checked the motherboard support site (Asus Rampage V) and there hasn't been anything released since I last danced to this tune.

One hunch I have that I didn't follow up on is maybe something to do with the cards having no video cable plugged in -- like it was waiting for an HDMI/HDPC or DPort handshake that never came? I'm currently running all displays off of the primary card and I gather this is the appropriate thing to do -- even if I wanted to use a card per display I'd be one display short anyway.

So I guess wait and hope for better drivers and otherwise just keep a stopwatch handy when I reboot so I can reassure myself that it just needs more time.

When I first got my R9 390X I was having a similar issue. For me it turned out I needed to toggle the BIOS/UEFI button on the GPU. So that it matched my system setting of BIOS rather than UEFI. I could enable my system for UEFI, but I don't see how I would again anything when using Windows 7.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

2) Process Monitor event log was pretty interesting; from the Registry var access pattern I could see it doing stuff for each card and then for each extra card past the first one there would be a flurry of activity followed by a 1.5 to 2 minute jump in the log. I could tell it was doing NVidia driver stuff because of the reg-key names and nothing else was going on in that interval.

So are we back now to similar problems like in XP (I think it was) when you had to have a fake monitor plug in video cards for them to be properly detected? What goes around comes around!!!

Hopefully someone will come up with a workaround for this; waiting several minutes for a boot (with a black screen) is kind of scary, no?

Is it a driver problem? Or does the card respond slowly to a query from the driver if it has no monitor plugged in? As I said above, this is a 10x0 problem, didn't happen with my 980s or 980tis...

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Shaggie,

Did you upgrade the bios of your Mobo for Broadwell or is it still the original for Haswell?

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If you are running SIV by chance, Ray provides a picture and instructions for a Dummy DVI plug inside the SIV menu structure. <Help> >> <Conversions> >> <Dummy DVI>. I've found that every EVGA card I've ever bought comes with a DVI to VGA adapter. Either scrounging around in my spare parts bin or buying the Radio Shack 1000 count 1/8W resistor pack has provided me with the three 75 ohm resistors to plug into the adapter. Installing that on the cards without a monitor plugged in has always allowed Windows to see the cards. You might want to try that experiment to see if that shortens your Desktop wakeup interval.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)

Did you upgrade the bios of your Mobo for Broadwell or is it still the original for Haswell?

I'd had old BIOS before when I'd tried but then I updated to the latest and there hasn't been anything new since.

If you are running SIV by chance, Ray provides a picture and instructions for a Dummy DVI plug inside the SIV menu structure. <Help> >> <Conversions> >> <Dummy DVI>. I've found that every EVGA card I've ever bought comes with a DVI to VGA adapter. Either scrounging around in my spare parts bin or buying the Radio Shack 1000 count 1/8W resistor pack has provided me with the three 75 ohm resistors to plug into the adapter. Installing that on the cards without a monitor plugged in has always allowed Windows to see the cards. You might want to try that experiment to see if that shortens your Desktop wakeup interval.

That's a pretty nifty hack -- I think I have a grab bag of resistors somewhere and definitely have plenty of DVI->VGA plugs I can mess with. I was thinking I could probably wire into one of the aux ports on my monitors just to terminate it. That'll be a project for next weekend!

Shaggie,

You said it only happens when you use more than 1 card in your system?

Have you tried switching out the cards and doing it individually to see if they all boot ok or if it's 1 or 2 in particular that causes the causes the delay?

How many cards have to be inserted before this delay starts?

Have you tried rotating the power plugs to the different cards? (sometimes there can be a faulty power plug)

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I've also had two motherboard failures this year where I lose one of the PCIe X16 slots I have a graphics card installed in it. First one was a 5 year old ASUS motherboard and its replacement MSI board after 3 months. Problem wouldn't cause any issues with the other video card installed but on the ASUS MB, Windows wouldn't boot if a card was installed in the bad slot without a lot of cold booting or MB resetting.

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Seti@Home classic workunits:20,676 CPU time:74,226 hours

A proud member of the OFA (Old Farts Association)