New PC - Couple of issues/questions

[Thrasher]

Hi, I got my new build at the weekend and have a couple of small issues. I hope someone can point me in the right direction.

1) I cannot seem to enter the BIOS. At boot I get the PCS logo and "Press F2 or DEL to enter BIOS" but repeatedly hitting either key does nothing and the system continues to load into Windows.

2) Once in Windows I cannot tell if my overlock has actually been applied, I'm assuming not as it reports the CPU as i7 7700k @ 4.2GHz. I assume I just have to download the BIOS overclock file from my order page and then apply it? Is this normal for PCS OC'd systems? I thought it would already be applied. Obviously now applying this is related to issue 1.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance for any replies.


System Spec:-

Case
FRACTAL DEFINE R5 BLACK QUIET MID-TOWER CASE
Overclocked CPU
Overclocked Intel® Core™i7-7700k Quad Core (4.20GHz @ up to 4.8GHz)
Motherboard
ASUS® ROG STRIX Z270E GAMING: LG1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GB, Wi-Fi - RGB Ready!
Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3200MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
11GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080 Ti - HDMI, 3x DP GeForce - GTX VR Ready!
1st Hard Disk
5TB SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 128MB CACHE
M.2 SSD Drive
1TB SAMSUNG SM961 M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3200MB/R, 1800MB/W)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
NOT REQUIRED
Power Supply
CORSAIR 850W RMx SERIES™ MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling
Noctua NH-U14S Ultra Quiet Performance CPU Cooler

 

[Rakk]

2) Once in Windows I cannot tell if my overlock has actually been applied, I'm assuming not as it reports the CPU as i7 7700k @ 4.2GHz. I assume I just have to download the BIOS overclock file from my order page and then apply it? Is this normal for PCS OC'd systems? I thought it would already be applied. Obviously now applying this is related to issue 1.

It will have been applied, but when your PC doesn't need it, it won't use it, so if you're not doing much it will look like its not OC'd - to get to see it using the OC you'd need to run something that needs it - eg. I can see mine kick in whenever I play the game I normally play because it is very CPU dependent, many games however are not.
Also where are you looking at clock speed, if you're just looking at the System section of the Control Panel I think it will always just state the stock speed for the CPU in the format you've written above.

 

[Oussebon]

If you want to confirm that your CPU is OCed you could run something like Cinebench while monitoring your CPU's frequency with something like CPU-Z or Realtemp.

 

[Thrasher]

Thanks for the replies guys. I was checking based on the name in the System Info, or via Task Manager > Performance. I thought it might just be displaying the clock speed based on the default manufacturer information or something, I did see it go up to 4.5GHz when I was doing some stuff - just assumed this was a boosted clock. Anyway, I'll run some benchmarks tonight and see what happens - I intend to do this to check temps anyway.

Any ideas on the BIOS issue?

 

[Tony1044]

Hi, I got my new build at the weekend and have a couple of small issues. I hope someone can point me in the right direction.

1) I cannot seem to enter the BIOS. At boot I get the PCS logo and "Press F2 or DEL to enter BIOS" but repeatedly hitting either key does nothing and the system continues to load into Windows.

Try this from within Windows:

1 - Click the "start" button (the window icon, bottom left) then click the gear in the left hand edge of the start menu



2 - In the white box in the settings screen, type advanced. Then click on Change advanced start-up options:



3 - Click Restart now



Now at this point mine reboots but you may get more options depending how things are configured so you may have more steps:

4 - Select Troubleshoot

5 - Choose Advanced options

6 - Select UEFI Firmware Settings

7 - Click Restart to restart the system and enter UEFI (BIOS)

 

[Thrasher]

Ah nice one, cheers Tony. I didn't know you could reboot into BIOS from Windows, very interesting! Not sure why it didn't let me do that at POST, but as long as I can get there I don't mind. Will try this out when I get home tonight. Have a great day!

 

[Tony1044]

Ah nice one, cheers Tony. I didn't know you could reboot into BIOS from Windows, very interesting! Not sure why it didn't let me do that at POST, but as long as I can get there I don't mind. Will try this out when I get home tonight. Have a great day!

You too - it's because of the way EUFI handles things. I lost my ability to F2 some time around Anniversary Edition upgrade. Never bothered to check if it's an option in the BIOS itself.

 

[Rakk]

You too - it's because of the way EUFI handles things. I lost my ability to F2 some time around Anniversary Edition upgrade. Never bothered to check if it's an option in the BIOS itself.

It only appears to affect/have changed for some people though, I know I have the Anniversary Update on my machine yet I can still use F2/Del to get into the UEFI BIOS on my machine .... (I did it last week)

 

[ubuysa]

You too - it's because of the way EUFI handles things. I lost my ability to F2 some time around Anniversary Edition upgrade. Never bothered to check if it's an option in the BIOS itself.

It only appears to affect/have changed for some people though, I know I have the Anniversary Update on my machine yet I can still use F2/Del to get into the UEFI BIOS on my machine .... (I did it last week)

I believe this is an effect of Windows 10's 'fast startup' feature. Fast startup actually hibernates the kernel so that an apparently cold boot is in fact partly a resume from hibernation. I understand that some motherboards do not play well with hibernation and thus they don't play well with fast startup either.

You can either stop fast startup (it's in power options, click 'choose what the power buttons do') or disable hibernation altogether (powercfg -h off).

 

[Rakk]

I believe this is an effect of Windows 10's 'fast startup' feature. Fast startup actually hibernates the kernel so that an apparently cold boot is in fact partly a resume from hibernation. I understand that some motherboards do not play well with hibernation and thus they don't play well with fast startup either.

You can either stop fast startup (it's in power options, click 'choose what the power buttons do') or disable hibernation altogether (powercfg -h off).

Ahh, that would explain it, the fast start-up annoyed me, cos it was so easy to accidentally turn the machine back on when I wasn't meaning to - also to turn to backliting off on my keyboard (which stayed lit even when the PC is off) you press a combination of 2 keys on the keyboard to turn it off and this turned the PC back on ....