DELL PC taking 5+minuts to boot

DELL XPS 11700K Nvidia Geforce RTX3070 GPU

PC Boots fine when Nvidia card is installed with correct drivers. However disconnecting the Nvidia card and removing the drivers so that the PC boots with the onboard GPU causes bootup to be delayed by 5 or more minutes. During this time the activation light on the back does not show activity and the PC cannot be booted to BIOS. Numlock is on the keyboard but the normal boot sequence of numlock on /off/ on does not occur.

when configured for multiboot with the Nvidia card installed the boot menu appears correctly and selection of an OS and subsequent boot is fine.
However with the Nvidia card removed the system is as described above and takes 5min+ to boot. Also significantly there is no boot menu it only boots to the default OS. This is even though the timeout could be set to 999.

There is no POST info displayed and all hardware tests come back 100% pass.

This appears to be like the BIOS is searching for the Nvidia card and only boots to windows if it either finds it or after a long timeout period.

Does this look like it could be a mobo hardware fault or is it more likely bad bios from DELL? One DELL rep did tell me that if the PC was sold with a graphics card then it needs it to run but my understanding is that only F processors have internal GPU off and that K suffixes denote overclocking and internal GPU capable.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to solve this please?

thanks

What is the actual XPS model? 8940?

The Dell POST (Power On Self Test) and the Support Assist are probably searching for the NVIDIA.
If you take the video card out, do a CMOS reset first, before booting and see if that makes a difference. May take two Power On POSTs for it to "learn".

To clear CMOS (BIOS), power off, disconnect AC power cord, press power button to drain any residual power. Open case and locate the CR2032 coin cell battery on the motherboard. Remove battery for at least 5 minutes. Reinstall battery, reconnect AC power cord and power on.

fireberd said:

What is the actual XPS model? 8940?

The Dell POST (Power On Self Test) and the Support Assist are probably searching for the NVIDIA.
If you take the video card out, do a CMOS reset first, before booting and see if that makes a difference. May take two Power On POSTs for it to "learn".

To clear CMOS (BIOS), power off, disconnect AC power cord, press power button to drain any residual power. Open case and locate the CR2032 coin cell battery on the motherboard. Remove battery for at least 5 minutes. Reinstall battery, reconnect AC power cord and power on.

Yeh I already tried that early on it doesn't cure anything. It's actually worse because the BIOS default setting points to bootx64.efi instead of bootmgrfw.efi and gives a blue screen and nothing more not even a slow boot. That confused me for a long time!

Thanks for the suggestion though.

oh yeh it is 8940.

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Is there any way of displaying or logging what is happening whilst the bios is handing off to windows? ie from power on to windows signin.

One other possibility is the motherboard. Dell, on many models over the years, has used different motherboards relative to how it was ordered. Probably the reason the Dell support mentioned if it was sold with separate video card, it needs it.

fireberd said:

One other possibility is the motherboard. Dell, on many models over the years, has used different motherboards relative to how it was ordered. Probably the reason the Dell support mentioned if it was sold with separate video card, it needs it.

It could be yes. But in this case I would say they mis-sold it to me. if I wanted a PC that needed a graphics card I would have bought 11700F which would have been much cheaper. The fact that they sold the K and remarked in their sales blurb that the internal GPU could be used in multimonitor then one would rightly assume the intel GPU worked as it should. This DELL is the worst PC I've ever owned. Even though it is probably the most powerful. I would not buy DELL again as it currently stands.

I have a feeler out on the Dell "Rockstar" forum section to see if there are different motherboards. I'll post here when I get an answer.
The Dell specs for the 8940 list 26 different 10th and 11th gen CPU options.

fireberd said:

I have a feeler out on the Dell "Rockstar" forum section to see if there are different motherboards. I'll post here when I get an answer.
The Dell specs for the 8940 list 26 different 10th and 11th gen CPU options.

Thanks Fireberd. Yes they have many options and it seems they may tailor the bios to the option which kinda surprises me. I have an engineer coming in the week to swap out the mobo. I'll come back here with the result. Cheers!

One item of note, from the Dell forum. Dell uses a "KF" CPU in some models. Maybe what you have?

Here is the 8940 motherboard list. No info on the differences.

XPS 8940 motherboards =
KV3RP Foxconn 02012PQ00-600-G, Released July 9, 2020
2W4W1 Foxconn 02012TA00-600-G, Released December 1, 2020, Brazil only
F1H92 Foxconn 02012YJ00-600-G, Released March 15, 2021, Brazil only
427JK Foxconn 02012VY00-600-G, Released March 15, 2021
K3CM7 Foxconn ??, Released July 14, 2021

Another I found on the Dell forum. HDMI VS Display Port for monitor:
Got a Dell 8940 XPS without Graphics Card for a bargain. So far so good. A great compact machine, but the HDMI port on the mainboard is not active on boot. It takes 5-10 minutes after pressing the power button for the PC to realize there is a monitor connected. If connected via DisplayPort, everything works fine as it should. If only HDMI port is connected + ethernet + mouse + keyboard, display stays dark, keyboard and mouse are NOT powered and nothing happens. After 5-10 minutes the white led above the audio ports of the mainboard is activated, after another half minute or so mouse and keyboard are activated and then there is the output over HDMI.