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Was the 'double boot' thing ever officially explained?

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Old Thrashbarg

Member
Joined
Sep 26, 2007
The topic may be kinda beaten to death, but after a great amount of searching, I've found no clear answer as to why boards with P35/G33/etc. chipsets exhibit this behavior. A lot of people say it's due to overclocks, some say it's normal but offer no technical explanation of it, and pretty much all of it seems to be speculation.

I recently acquired an Intel DG33FB along with an E5200. When I got it, it had an older BIOS which would POST normally. After updating to the latest version to fix some other bugs, now it double boots every time, both from cold and on reboots. Everything is running at stock settings, so it's not to do with overclocking. If it's a normal, intended behavior, why is it, then, that it didn't happen on an older BIOS?

Does anyone else have an Intel-branded board that does this? I can find plenty of reports about Abit and other 'enthusiast' brands, but nary a word about the real Intel boards.

Then that just leaves my other question: Was there ever an official word explaining the behavior? As in, straight from the mouth of an Intel tech or the like?

This is all just out of curiosity, I'm not particularly bothered by the issue, but being that this is the first time I've ever encountered such a thing, I'd like to know exactly why it acts so differently from every other piece of computer hardware made in the last 15 or so years.
 
My DFI board has done that every since I got it. I always suspected it was just a power recycle kind of thing.

I know it has nothing to do with OC's since it did it even before I started OCing the board.
 
My board does that as well, but only while changing some items in the bios. Not sure which ones yet though. As far as an official explanation, I dont have one.
 
My Asus Rampage Formula always dual boots if the PSU is switched off and the RAM voltage is set to the specs provided by the vendor. From what I've gathered when researching this behaviour, it IS normal. However, what I'm more interested in is whether this double booting is harmful to the system components or not. It surely seems to be more harmful than single boot, but I'm not sure if it's worth worrying about. I couldn't care less if it double boots since it takes only a second longer, but if it puts a noticeable strain on the system, I would avoid it. Anyone could elaborate on this?
 
Strap speeds... I'd heard that explanation before. So that's all it is? And is that to say that it wouldn't do that if the CPU and memory both matched the default straps, whatever those may be?

but if it puts a noticeable strain on the system, I would avoid it.

The only thing I might be a little concerned about is the hard drives... I dunno if it's really harmful, per se, but I'm not sure I care for the fact that it spins up the drives for a second, cuts power, then spins 'em up again. Conventional wisdom would say that it's not really a good thing for longevity of hard drive life.
 
yup, nothing to be concerned about. when you pull the chord from the wall, and plug it back in, even at stock speeds, the board has to momentarily shut down to apply what you have set in bios.
 
I don't have an intel board, but my board actually "quad boots." Oc' or not it will cycle the fans four times. The first just cycles, the second cycles and shows the lights on the keyboard, the third cycles, shows the lights and beeps once, and the fourth cycles, shows the lights, beeps and then continues to boot. :screwy: But I believe it is like going through some checklist type deal...
 
when you pull the chord from the wall, and plug it back in

People keep talking about cutting the power completely. Does it not happen to you any other time? I get it on every cold boot, even when the machine hasn't been unplugged, and on every reboot as well.
 
People keep talking about cutting the power completely. Does it not happen to you any other time? I get it on every cold boot, even when the machine hasn't been unplugged, and on every reboot as well.


well, if my board doenst like the ram, then it does that yes! Ive had lots of cranky d9gmh give me that headache! but in all honesty, i never shut my pc off anymore unless its for maintenance. also, low nb-v can cause it to cold boot like that. it seemed to be the same with my p5b-d, p5k-d and my rampage.

if its doing that to you even when you reboot.. then i would say can you try some different stix? are your stix gmh?
 
I've already tried different RAM. I swapped it out the other day, after discovering that my Corsair XMS2 was responsible for some instability. Turns out it wanted 1.9V rather than 1.8.

So I replaced that with 2x1GB of Corsair Value-series, and then a little later I added 2x512MB of some Samsung stuff that came out of a Dell. It's all DDR2-667, and I know it's all perfectly good JEDEC-spec RAM. No idea what chips it uses though, I don't keep up with such things. I've also tried it on both 'Auto' and 'Manual' settings in the BIOS. The boot behavior doesn't change no matter what I do.
 
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