I recently helped a friend upgrade their WoW system with a new motherboard, RAM, and CPU. They were on an old AMD FX system with DDR3 and a hand-me-down Titan X (weird combo, I know) and were having frame drops to low single digits in many circumstances (e.g., Mech: Workshop, Epic BGs) while running the game at relatively low graphics settings at 2560x1080p.
My friendly only uses the computer to play WoW and was looking to spend about $300 on an upgrade. I put together a part list that included an ASROCK B450M-HDV board, 16GB (2x8) of 3200MHz CL16 Team Vulcan RAM, and a Ryzen 5 3600. Price with tax from Amazon was about $330. After a lengthy build process (e.g., RAM seating issues, updating from W7 due to blue-screening) with me helping remotely, they are finally playing WoW at high settings and having a really good experience.
There is, however, one issue that we have not resolved. Since enabling XMP, boot time has increased by about 30 seconds. The computer seems to hang early in the process. We have updated the BIOS to the latest version (and updated the chipset drivers and changed to AMD’s power plan in W10), but the computer still takes awhile to boot. I have read that some people think this issue has to do with the motherboard doing something to read/test the RAM, but I am not sure.
Has anyone had or seen a similar issue? Any recommended fixes? My friend is fine with it because the computer still boots faster than before the hardware upgrade, but it bothers me and I’d like to give them a solution to get some “closure” on the build.