Hello, 

try hard resetting the bios ( remove the cmos battery for some minutes / discharge the  psu by pressing the button for 30s without the cmos / power cable )

Hi @mazzinia_ 

this I have done for the first power up. I have removed the CMOS battery and unplugged the power supply. Additionally I have short-circutted the two battery terminals (sometimes there is a cap parallel to the battery which can hold the Voltage for a few hours) and let the system without power and battery for ~30min. I had to re-enter the date and time, so the BIOS was fully resettet.

On the first starup it has done re power-cycle as usual when the battery was empty.

@user_003c73​ I see. Aside trying to do it again, the only idea i have is to update the bios ( if is not the last version ) to then update the ME firmware. But honestly I'm always a bit cautious at updating this kind of things in a system out of warranty

So, I got a Solution, but I do not know why/how it worked. I fugured out that I have the FW A33, not A34, so not the newest one. I tried to upgrade the FW, but I got this message:

I deactivated the core insulation but it still didn't work. I read through the internet and found out that MS has blocked the DBUtil_2_3.Sys because of security issues somewhere in 2020.

So I removed the NVME (the Card with FAN) and insert a SATA SSD, resettet the BIOS once again by removing the battery, installed a old version of Win10 (2017 - I had a installation CD). At this point I noticed that the PC was booting withoout any warnings and "fast". I updated the BIOS to A34.

I thought maybe it has to do something with the PCIe lines to the NVME. So I removed both CPUs, cleaned them with alcohol, interchanged them and put everything back together.

I re-installed the NVME, resettet the BIOS once again and powered it on. Set the Date & Time and all the other things as usual and the PC booted up without any problems.

So I really do not know what caused the error messages and the 5min boot time. Was the BIOS corrupted? Was one of the CPUs PCIe lines bad/dirty/whatever?

Now everything is working as expected.

Thanks for your support!

@user_003c73​ well, happy that things are working as they should, now... it's the only thing that matters

@user_a40df8​ thanks for your Answer, but as I wrote in the post December 11th, 2025 15:07, it works now without any issues. Most likely there was a contact problem to the PCIe lanes. But I did several things what solved the issue:

- cleaned the CPU contacts with alcohol

- interchanged the two CPUs

- updated FW from A31 to A34 by installing an old version of W10 to SATA SSD

- Resetted BIOS a couple of times

Now the system is booting without any issues/warnings and as fast as before the upgrade.

The two E5-2996v4 are fully working in Games, Benchmarks and Programms.