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Title: Wii Boot Times
Date: Jan 18, 2026
By: Techflash
So, yesterday, I was bored, and I did some Wii boot timing tests.
I've always felt that the Wii sometimes took a weirdly long amount of time to boot up given what it has to do to pull it off.
So, as such, I decided to try put it to the test and get hard numbers to confirm my suspicions.
These were all
- on the same console
- with the same SD Card
- measuring time from power -> unless mentioned
... to cut down on testing variance; yes I had to switch between BootMii-as-boot2 installed/not and Priiloader installed/not for this test
So, here's the results:
- Worst case (boot0 -> boot1 -> boot2 (stock) -> IOS -> Priiloader (set to autoboot SysMenu) -> reload IOS -> boot sysmenu): 6.52 seconds
- Second-worst case (boot0 -> boot1 -> boot2 (stock) -> IOS -> Priiloader (set to autoboot BootMii IOS) -> BootMii IOS -> MINI -> Gumboot): 5.36 seconds
- Meh case [stock] (boot0 -> boot1 -> boot2 (stock) -> IOS -> sysmenu): 4.85 seconds
- Best case (boot0 -> boot1 -> boot2 (BootMii) -> MINI -> Gumboot): 3.48 seconds
- Best case - only measuring power -> first USB gecko output from BootMii boot2 (boot0 -> boot1 -> boot2 (BootMii): 1.53 seconds
so, that gives a rough estimate that the early parts of the process
(Hardware init -> boot0 -> load and verify boot1 -> boot1 starts -> load and verify boot2 -> boot2 starts -> *[measure here]*)
... clocks in somewhere around 1.5s. I wonder how much of that is boot1, DDR Controller initialization is probably costly...
That's all I wanted to put out for today, thanks for reading :)