Modern computers have become pretty powerful, and even compared to the builds from 5 years ago, we've come a pretty long way. Back in the day, the metric for how powerful and fast your computer was happened to be measured in boot time. Was this a good metric? Probably not, but one thing is for sure: we've stopped caring about boot times as much, especially on the desktop side of things. As long as everything loads fast once the thing is on, it doesn't really matter.
This was my thought process until a few weeks ago, when I was messing around in my BIOS and had to clear the CMOS. After clearing, my boot times suddenly became uncomfortably long—long enough for me to believe there could be a problem with the POST. Once it did boot, though, I thought that this was just initial memory training, and that my system would resume booting quickly again with subsequent power-ons. This wasn't the case, and things stayed sluggish. Thankfully, this one somewhat hidden BIOS setting made a massive difference, and shaved nearly 50 seconds off of my boot times.
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Why modern systems can take a long time to boot
It's not the fault of your operating system
A lot of users these days will blame their OS for slow boot times, but that's not usually the culprit anymore. On a modern SSD, loading an OS can take just a few seconds, and the real delay is the POST, or Power-On Self-Test. A POST is the process your motherboard goes through when it's initializing hardware before it hands over control to the OS kernel.
Part of this process involves initializing the memory. On modern systems with fast DDR4 and especially DDR5, the initialization process has only become more complex. During the POST, your motherboard will test signal timings, voltage behavior, and memory controller parameters to ensure the RAM is stable at the speed you've selected, whether that's an XMP profile or the JEDEC defaults. As memory has increased in speed, tightened in timings and become higher in capacity-per-stick, this memory training process has become a lot more lengthy. As a result, boot times have gone up in general, and some systems will err on the side of caution and retrain with every boot—even if the system hasn't lost power from the previous one. This is what was happening with my AM5 system.
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My system was especially slow
Over a full minute from pressing the power button is unacceptable to me
My system is fairly new, sporting a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and 64 GB of DDR5-6000. Intuitively, I know that cold boots should take my system a hot minute because of the relatively high amount of RAM, but when I timed my boots, they consistently surpassed the 60-second mark. In Task Manager, my BIOS time was also consistently hitting above that mark, which told me it didn't have anything to do with my OS.
This is way too long, even as someone who doesn't really turn their system off very much. The bizarre thing is: it never used to take this long. I began searching the BIOS for any potential answers, and after trying different combinations of Fast Startup and Fast Boot settings, I figured it might be worth looking into my RAM configuration, and the solution was right there.
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Memory Context Restore fixes long boot times on AM5
It's a one-toggle solution
Memory Context Restore (MCR) allows your motherboard to recycle the previously known-good memory parameters and use them for each subsequent startup. In other words, if nothing has changed, the system assumes the memory will behave the same way it did last time, and skip training altogether. It's a BIOS setting, and can usually be found under your memory settings.
This is fundamentally different from Fast Boot. Fast Boot focuses on skipping peripheral checks or OS-level initialization steps. Memory Context Restore operates at the firmware level, cutting out one of the most time-consuming parts of POST entirely. When it works as intended, the system moves almost immediately past memory initialization and into loading the OS.
As far as I can surmise from Reddit posts and other AM5 boards I've used, this doesn't seem to be the default behavior. Intel boards can have a similar toggle under a different name, but from what I can tell, it's usually enabled by default, or the training doesn't take as long for Intel platforms. After enabling MCR on my system, my boot times went from consistently hitting 60 seconds or more, all the way down to under 10 seconds, which is pretty insane.
MCR doesn't come without a little bit of risk, though. If you're running memory speeds in excess of 7000 or running extremely high capacities, your mileage will vary significantly, as the conditions required to make those kinds of DDR5 setups work are delicate. Reusing old parameters from previous training over long stretches of time could lead to instability, though most users should be safe turning it on. If your system begins to fail during POST, it'd be one of the first things I'd try to turn off.
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Who knew skipping a whole part of the boot process would make everything faster
For something as obvious as boot times, I was surprised at how hidden this BIOS setting was. It's not enabled by default, and isn't usually found under the "Boot" section, or at least it wasn't on my system. While it could introduce a hint of instability over long stretches of time, I'm totally fine with that when the trade-off is shaving 50 seconds off of my PC's boot time.