Secrets Of BIOS Tweaking

Sivar writes "While most enthusiasts are familiar with some settings that yield significant performance benefits, many other BIOS settings remain poorly described and may unknowingly play a crucial role in system performance and stability. Ars Technica has an excellent article describing some of the most obscure settings, useful not only for performance, but for tweaking stability and hardware compatibility as well."

Comments

USB Keyboard And LILO

[N8F8]

Just a tip: If you have trouble booting LILO with a USB keyboard try enabling Legacy USB support in the BIOS. It worked for me on a Dell GX240 Optiplex when all I would get is a Keyboard failure notice. You may also have to turn off "halt on error".

PnP

[Anonymous Coward]

Disable that pesky PnP in the BIOS. Could've saved quite a bit of hair pulling on a FreeBSD 4.6.2 install.

Re:PnP

[turgid]

That's good advice, since modern kernels like *BSD and Linux can and do prefer to take care of configuring PCI devices themselves. It's only users of DOS and DOS-based versions of Windows that need to have this feature enabled, AFAIK.

I liked this article the first time i saw it...

[diesel_jackass]

THG has had a good BIOS guide as well:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/97q1/970101 /index.html

and also a guide on BIOS tuning:
http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/01q3/010725/inde x.html

Re:I liked this article the first time i saw it...

[RedWolves2]

Those are some nice guides...

for me to poop on.

Re:I liked this article the first time i saw it...

[RedWolves2]

Come on you guys never saw Triumph the cowardly dog??

Re:I liked this article the first time i saw it...

[Anonymous Coward]

lol :)
Crud... just used my mod points :(

Re:I liked this article the first time i saw it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or better yet, how about link back to the original, definative BIOS guide that Tom ripped off for that article?

Adrian's Rojak Pot : http://www.rojakpot.com/Speed_Demonz/New_BIOS_Guid e/Index.htm

It's in the middle of rev 7.0 now, but the 6.x series are pretty good.

Re:I liked this article the first time i saw it...

[Wanker]

Speaking of Tom's... After following the BIOS article (which is a very good read), the first forum I stumbled across was:

http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?a=tp c&s=50009562&f=77909774&m=8400979235

In this forum the poster makes a pretty convincing case that the photo of the P4 3.3GHz chip in the "Hot Contraband: P4 With 3.6 GHz" article was forged. A subtraction analysis (described in detail in the forum) shows a nice little black box indicating they just copied a "3" to make the 3.3GHz photo.

In my mind, this throws a lot of doubt on anything posted on Tom's hardware. Which is really too bad-- I liked that site a lot.

Re:I liked this article the first time i saw it...

[jsse]

I got system crc error on boot merely by changing a couple of memory options. This is not an universial guide for everybody and you should really experiment each option yourself.

Just a little warning so that you dont' need to reset back to factory default. :)

Re:I liked this article the first time i saw it...

[gl4ss]

MOD PARENT UP MOD PARENT UP!

this is the funniest thg remark i have seen EVER of thg ;). (and still remember thg intro before ski or die, on my obviously not so dmca compliant copy).

and to keep this post up on the topic..
toms hardware has never been very trustworthy or even a good read.. just gimmicks after gimmicks, like their 'watercooling video guide', sure it shows how to stick hoses to block, but that's just about the real use of it, and the stupid dudes can't figure out that if i download divx avi there's no point zipping it up

Re:I liked this article the first time i saw it...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't have memory modules with ECC on board, it's a bad idea to turn that feature on in the BIOS indeed. But you _should_ be able to get back into setup to turn it off again, as setup itself is normally executed with fail-safe settings. If it weren't, a lot of overclockers would be in dire straits after a couple of experiments.

Re:I liked this article the first time i saw it...

[diesel_jackass]

I can't believe it! I always trusted THG. I feel like my entire life has been a lie!!! aah!

seriously though. why would they fake a pic like that? it makes me wonder if their articles are even true anymore. how many of their benchmarks are fake?

Re:I liked this article the first time i saw it...

[Sj0]

I think his claim that PCMark 2002 is an old program with no optimizations for intel or AMD throws it into doubt even more.

Re:I liked this article the first time i saw it...

[Artifex]

I haven't visited Tom's in ages... and it's been even longer since I was a regular reader. Fittingly, it was Ars that supplanted THG in my "holy trinity" of hardware sites to read when bored (Anandtech and SharkyExtreme being the other two - Slashdot is in a different category altogether).

I was really hoping my last memories of Tom's would be good ones. Tom's used to be a great resource in the olden days of overclocking. I learned the basics from him, and overclocked my Pentium 166 to 200 and later my PIII 550 to 733, and both still run stably with "stock" fans and default voltage years later. Now I see deception, and I hear that this isn't the first time.

This is like being 12 years old and being told to go visit your dying grandpa in a hospital room. Instead of just remembering him laughing and teaching you how to work with wood, you get to remember tubes everywhere and his hands shaking...

Re:I liked this article the first time i saw it...

[Perdo]

On the last page of Tom's advertizers section is a section entitled "Editorial content sponsorships"

Thus the about face on Rambus and Intel in general.

Tom "will never forget the deceit of Intel" revolving around the memory translator hub recall, the 1.13 Ghz .18 micron PIII recall and their support of Rambus when it was clear that Rambus was trying to assert a monopoly on ram.

A few days after I noticed the "Editorial content sponsorships", he posted the editorial "proving" that Rambus was better than DDR because on a heavily overclocked system, DDR stops scaling.

Tom is a heel. I once admired him. He brought Intel to it's knees by proving the 1.13 processor was factory overclocked.

Now Tom is an Intel/Rambus/Bapco stool.

At least Alex "Sharky" Ross had the moral spine to leave Sharky's when that site became an Intel ad.

Re:I liked this article the first time i saw it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats a pretty sad image. Quite potent.

Re:I liked this article the first time i saw it...

[jsse]

It's said in the document the tune is apply to non-ECC RAM too. In fact, the document said clearly that ECC actually slow down the system, and not recommended necessary there's a need.

Re:I liked this article the first time i saw it...

[Shanep]

Tom wouldn't know computer science if he was drowning in a Cray.

I remember back when the Voodoo2 reined supreme and he was in bed with 3Dfx, he claimed that AGP did not give any performance benefits over PCI, which is of course a great big pile of steaming horse shit.

He had some article written by some supposed CS expert that tried to state just that, but without any technical merit at all.

I thought it was pretty funny though, that on his own site, was a texture heavy benchmark showing a slow Matrox G200 AGP card running many many times faster than a system with dual Voodoo2's! This being due to the fact that the Voodoo2's could not cache enough of the textures locally and had to rely on the comparatively SLOW PCI bus.

A performance hit so severe, that a slow G200 was even able to run much faster due to it's AGP bus.

Of course, when Tom suddenly became an " Official nVidia review site! ", AGP was also suddenly much faster than PCI.

Oh what power Tom wields! The power of ignorance.

Re:I liked this article the first time i saw it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tom sux.

Why can't he look away from the mirror for once and write some real stuff like other sites out there.

It's a wonder ppl still send him stuff to review

Re:I liked this article the first time i saw it...

[Shanep]

Tom is a heel. I once admired him.

Tom, is a FILTHY WHORE.

He was in bed with 3Dfx, so proclaimed with supposed evidence that AGP gave no benefits over PCI. Then when he jumped out of their bed and into nVidia's, suddenly this was no longer an issue and he no longer ran benchmarks designed specifically to work within the SEVERE on board memory and PCI bandwidth constraints of 3Dfx products at the time (Voodoo2).

His site, even showed a Matrox G200 running much faster than a dual Voodoo2 setup (during his 3Dfx days), with a benchmark that used textures too big for the Voodoo2's to handle without using the PCI bus. A MATROX G200 BEATING THE SHIT OUT OF DUAL VOODOO2'S?!?! If that's not AGP coming to the rescue, then what is it? Of course, he conveniently ignored that minor little detail.

Anyone else know of any examples where Tom has made a sudden 180 degree turn in strong opinion immediately following a change in advertiser?

Then again, could it just be that he is a complete moron? He certainly would appear to not grasp even the basics of CS, the good articles are written by others.

This is great

[GrayCalx]

I can't get to it right now, but I hope its all that and some. Whenever i'm in my BIOS theres always a few I don't get. Good find.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

BIOS?

[Lawst]

Hmm, BIOS means Bandwidth Instantly Obliterated by Slashdot?

Re:BIOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

So if you cross this message with this, you'd get a setting in BIOS that eliminates BIOS! :)

Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[The Moving Shadow]

I always wondered about the fact that (almost?) no manufacturer supplies a manual describing their BIOS setup in detail. Most of them mumble something like: "you can press DEL to fiddle around with things you will never comprehend during your lifetime" and that's about as much help as you get. They of course also have included this neat *sarcasm;)* help function in most BIOS setups that displays the context sensitive help. I don't know how often i pressed F1 in vain just to see the message: "Help: Enable A-20 Gate. PG UP=on PG DN=off" Stuff like that...

There sure has a reason to be for the lack of good documentation. The best manual uptill now was the one that came with my old ABIT KT7a RAID mobo, but maybe that's because back in those days it was considered a home "tweakers" board. So mr. Phoenix, Award, AMI, if you read this, please o please bundle nice manuals with your BIOS setups for us endusers to use, instead of hoping for great sites like Ars Technica and Tom's Hardware to help us out.

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[larien]

I can understand the lack of help within the BIOS; after all, you're trying to keep the BIOS footprint to a minimum and adding help text just increases footprint.

However, that isn't really any excuse for not documenting it elsewhere, other than some ID10T getting ideas that tweaking the BIOS is a safe thing to do...

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[vadim_t]

Why? AFAIK BIOS is in ROM and memory is really cheap these days.

What I'd love to see in BIOS is a good disk partitioning tool and a memtest86 or something like it.

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[BumbaCLot]

Those companies sell chips to motherboard manufacturers, along with 3-5 other companies. Motherboards are made in Asia, where English is not the primary language spoken. You will not be seeing what you are requesting any time soon. And if you do, they will not be very easy to understand either.

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[Zocalo]

I've always found Asus (they use Award's BIOS) to be another notable exception in this regard, and there are a few others I'm sure. It's definately not the the norm though, and BIOS help does indeed suck universally, except for some of those stupid BIOS-on-a-cutdown-Windows some Tier 1's used to use, but then, it's not hard to document the three available settings well, is it? :P

Of course, since there are really only half a dozen or so BIOS vendors, the mobo vendor manuals are pretty much interchangable, and /. not withstanding, I've found several web sites post documentation for them besides this one via Google.

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[Squarewav]

there is a simple reason for this and you may not like, system manufactures don't want people messing with the bios unless they know what they are doing and the easy way to do this is to make it as cryptic as possible, why? well many bios settings on some MB can easily burn out devices esp. ones about clock speed , they don't want some guy going "hey lets just crank up pci buss speed to 133mhz, shood make things faster!" and end up burning up a few pci devices. Its the same logic that MS has for the registry make it cryptic as possible so people don't mess with it

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[afidel]

There is basically only two bios vendors, award and ami/phoenix. Other than them there are the OEM's that roll their own like some of IBM's laptops.

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[saider]

Why not just use LinuxBIOS? A minimal footprint system should fit onto a reasonable (32MB) flash part.

Most BIOSes are designed to fit onto 128k or 256k parts. No real reason for this limit other than fact that these parts in volume are pretty cheap and they do the job required.

A company I used to work for made some embedded devices where we put the BIOS, OS and applications all on a 32MB flash part. It was basically an i386 platform with some custom hardware and software. Heck it could even run Win9x off a disk drive.

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[GargoyleMT]

A disk partitioning tool? OMG! That's a great idea. I wonder if PowerQuest has thought about an embedded version of their software.

There are some problems if you think in the long term - a typical BIOS wouldn't necessarily get outdated, but one with support for specific file systems would. Or could.

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[GargoyleMT]

You, sir, are an idiot. If there is adequate paper documentation, only the people who are comfortable tweaking their computers will take advantage of it.

Ever notice how prevalent the phrase "RTFM" is? Ever had to answer some computer illterate person's questions, and noted that the answer was in the documentation?

Most people don't read documentation, so if it has useful information in it, only the motivated people will have access to that information.

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[hoeferbe]

I've always found Asus (they use Award's BIOS) to be another notable exception

Agreed. My ASUS P2B-S motherboard came with a wonderful book that explained each setting in detail. Best of all, they make the manual in PDF format available for download.

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[Squarewav]

I dint say I agreed with it I said that's why they do it, and despite what you make think RTFM wont turn someone into a master on what they RTFM about, not to mention many docs esp. ones for Linux are not written for newbies and can be a hard read, I don't know how many times when I was new to Linux have a question on how something works, and not find what I was looking for, maybe my eyes over looked it, maybe it wasn't there, or more often then not worded in such a way that I dint understand what the hell it was talking about. If you really want people to be more computer literate when a newbie asks a simple question give him a simple reply, tell them how to do it then tell them to look up the docs for more info, telling someone to RTFM not only makes you a stuck-up jerk ,but makes the community look bad

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[pclminion]

I don't know how often i pressed F1 in vain just to see the message: "Help: Enable A-20 Gate. PG UP=on PG DN=off"

In case you are still mystified about A-20, it is an ancient holdover from when machines didn't have a high memory area. In 16 bit arithmetic, incrementing 65535 produces 0, and many programs took "advantage" of this fact. However on newer systems there was an extra address line, and if it was enabled this address "rollover" didn't happen correctly. Result: legacy programs crashing.

A-20 is automatically enabled by all 32-bit operating systems anyway. The option in the BIOS is there to control HOW that enabling happens. Modern chipsets can enable A-20 directly. Historically, however, A-20 was logically AND-ed with a pin on the keyboard controller, so in order to enable A-20 you had to reprogram the keyboard controller.

I love PCs, they are the only hardware I've encountered where you have to program the keyboard chip in order to enable high memory access. :)

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[vadim_t]

Well, I didn't really have filesystems in mind. Even something as stupid as MS fdisk would work. The idea is that it'd be really handy when you mess with LILO too much and leave the computer unbootable. If the BIOS let me activate another partition I could just boot something and fix it instead of searching for a boot floppy or CD.

Same for memtest86, if you have just one computer and the OS won't boot downloading it would be pretty hard. If some manufacturer made a decent board with embedded diagnostic and recovery tools I'd buy it as soon as I could

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[1u3hr]

I bought PC last year with a Grandmars i815 mobo, with a Phoenix BIOS. I put in my old hard disks, one for Win, one Linux, and powered on. The BIOS came up with a boot select screen to choose which OS to boot in... (not lilo, this was before that) I was pretty amazed and looked for some docs on this. Absolutely nothing on paper, on Grandmars or Phoenx's websites. (Lots on how to physically build it, though.) Nothing I could find on Google. I wondered what the point of putting in such a useful feature was if you didn't tell anyone about it. I never would have discoverd it if I hadn't had two bootable disks ready.

So it's hard not to suspect something like what happened to Be, when they persuaded a manufacturor to install BeOS to dualboot with Windows, and MS perusaded them to remove nay mention of this feature from the manual.

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[blender98]

So mr. Phoenix, Award, AMI,

Note that Phoenix gobbled up Award about five years ago. They're now different product lines of the same company.

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[Anonymous Coward]

Phoenix (not AMI) owns Award.

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always wondered about the fact that (almost?) no manufacturer supplies a manual describing their BIOS setup in detail

I think there's a relation to the fact that (almost?) no manufacturers write their own BIOS.

The same with video cards (those things do come with a PROM on board, and in some cases it's pin compatible with a 27xx eprom).
I've successfully let TNT2-based cards from clone builder XX work with a copy of the prom ripped off a card of manufacturer YY, as a workaround for a broken P&P device ID in XX's prom which prevented windows from finding any drivers for it.

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[Artifex]

There are some problems if you think in the long term - a typical BIOS wouldn't necessarily get outdated, but one with support for specific file systems would. Or could.

That's why BIOS is usually flashable, right? =)

Seriously, yes, having a built-in set of better diagnostic and prep utilities would be great. Just think of all those Gigabyte motherboards out there with dualie BIOS on the board, and what you could put in all that extra space if you could somehow access it.

On the other hand, while ROM does sound cheap, just remember that a $1 part undoubtedly costs more money to add to a board, probably more like $1.50 when you factor in the extra work in getting it on the board. Multiply $1.50 by 100,000 boards, and suddenly you're talking real money, and that's wholesale, way before retailer markup. Sure, hobbyists would be happy to pay the extra $1.50 (or even $5 or $10), but if they only buy 5-10% of the boards, the decision to include the part suddenly becomes much more difficult. Your average large VAR could care less about special BIOS options, and doesn't need to format drives in individual machines the way we do it because he has OEM licenses from MS, tapes of their latest OSes and software packs, and machines for batch-writing drives with the OS and software pre-installed.

P.S. My dollar figures are used to show the issue of relative costs only, and are probably nothing like the real costs.

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[compwiz3688]

system manufactures don't want people messing with the bios unless they know what they are doing and the easy way to do this is to make it as cryptic as possible

If they want it to be as cryptic as possible, they'd be using 0's and 1's only. :)

they don't want some guy going "hey lets just crank up pci buss speed to 133mhz, shood make things faster!" and end up burning up a few pci devices.

I guess I'm guilty. I can't remember how many times I looked at my 286's BIOS settings and thought: Why don't I just set my base memory to 2048K and extended to 0K and get past the 640K limit? (ok, it's not as bad as burning up a few PCI devices, but it does demonstrate the curiosity in all of us) It was back in the time when HIMEM.SYS causes my system to hang every now and then, so I was limited by software that knew about INT 15h and assigned all the extra memory to HD cache.

Re:Is it that hard to supply a BIOS setup manual?

[Professor North]

"The best manual uptill now was the one that came with my old ABIT KT7a RAID mobo" Hey, that's my current mobo! I love it :)

sorta useful, but short of the mark

[stratjakt]

about the memory hole at 16M:

"Sound Blaster Live cards like this to be enabled. It essentially removes 1MB of your RAM, so consider replacing the sound card instead."

Yeah, it would suck to have only 511 megs available. I'm not giving up my SB Live any time soon, at least not till I decide to get Audigy. It does mention that this is for SB16 emulation, but doesnt clarify by saying you only need that if you want legacy DOS soundblaster support. It's actually wrong: SB16 emulation happens transparently, SB16 pseudo-emulated 'mode' requires this. (Booting into plain DOS rather than running in a Win2k/XP console)

On the Video RAM Cache:

"Disable this. You don't want to be wasting the L2 cache on fast video RAM when you have slow system RAM to deal with"

Not every box has a sooper-dooper fast mega-card in it. I have boxes with old Cirrus Logic and Mach64 cards in 'em. And not every PC is equipped with AGP. Enabling this can yield a performance boost on some hardware, a little more detail here would help.

I dont have time to analyse the whole thing.. It got slashdotted before I could make it through, and I'm not a know-it-all techie geek. I just have enough rope to hang myself with, as the saying goes.

But like most 'BIOS' guides I've read, this gives alot of info on 'tweaks', with little mention of the damage that the wrong settings can do. I've seen RAM, PCI and AGP cards get fried because the user unwittingly 'overclocked' it.

They always just tell you what the fastest possible setting is, but never mention "if your hardware doesn't support it, you'll wreck it". Personally I think sacrificing stability for the sake of a 1% theoretical boost in performance is bad mojo.

There's also a disproportionate amount of Soundblaster-bashing going on here. Apparently my SB Lives have been crashing my systems and suffering poor sound latency for the last couple of years. Funny that I never noticed.

Re:sorta useful, but short of the mark

[Sludge]

"Sound Blaster Live cards like this to be enabled. It essentially removes 1MB of your RAM, so consider replacing the sound card instead."

Eh, I don't know about the Sound Blaster Live. The ISA spec (or common implementation) has some sort of a snag where you must do some sort of initialization routine (fuck, I'm not a driver programmer) in the first 16 megs of PC memory. As far as I know, this doesn't exist with PCI cards.

I remember having a problem insmodding my SBPro for a very long time, but having no problems when it was compiled into my kernel. I finally got around to learning about this.

Problems ceased when I got a PCI soundcard. (SBLive Value in fact)

Re:sorta useful, but short of the mark

[stratjakt]

yeah, thats true.. There's a backwards-compatible mode that SB Lives can use to act like an SB Pro for the odd guy who still runs pure DOS and needs to play Duke Nuke'm. Basically a 'pretend your an ISA card' thing, and IIRC it loads a driver (sys file) into this 1 meg hole to look like an SB Pro.

I'm no driver progammer either, but I know that this setting doesn't affect SoundBlaster Live under linux, WinNT/2k/XP. Or even 95/98/Me for that matter.

The article suggests that SB Live is somehow flawed in this respect, which to me just sounds like the author is making up a reason to hate SoundBlaster.

(The SB Live does have legitimate problems which are beyond the scope of the article. It doesn't like to co-exist with a secondary sound card, for example.)

Re:sorta useful, but short of the mark

[stratjakt]

Umm, I did read the article.

Nowhere does the article say it's a "bios giude aimed at tweaking a pc for gamers", it claims do de-mystify the BIOS for PC users in general. It *is* just another "tweak" guide, but purports to be more. That was my point.

And a disclaimer saying "you can ruin your os/hardware, we are not responsible" isn't enough for me. I wan't to know how, when and why.

Re:sorta useful, but short of the mark

[ahaning]

As far as I know, this doesn't exist with PCI cards.

Problems ceased when I got a PCI soundcard. (SBLive Value in fact)

I'll second this. I never had problems leaving the "16MB hole" option off when I was using a Creative ISA card. However, I've never needed it for my SBLive! 5.1, either. This is on Linux...I'm not sure about Windows, yet.

Re:sorta useful, but short of the mark

[dozer]

On the Video RAM Cache: Not every box has a sooper-dooper fast mega-card in it. I have boxes with old Cirrus Logic and Mach64 cards in 'em. And not every PC is equipped with AGP. Enabling this can yield a performance boost on some hardware, a little more detail here would help.

I'd be surprised if you ever saw a speedup for normal usage. Most VRAM writes are done via an acceleration engine/blitter that has no ability to use the L2 cache. And, for normal writes, good MTRRs will take care of the rest. So, they're correct: it's almost always wrong to use L2 to cache VRAM. Disable this option.

Note that this is not the same as caching the video driver in system RAM. Back in the DOS days, the entire video driver was contained on the card in slow ROM. This option would cause that ROM to be copied to the system memory, offering a big speedup. However, all modern OSes use their own video drivers (assuming XFree86 is part of the OS). Caching the ROM driver in RAM only wastes RAM. Disable this option too.

Re:sorta useful, but short of the mark

[Anonymous Coward]

the soundblaster live has always had some serious problems.. and the audigy is following in it;s tracks....

I reccomend buying a higher level card like a turtle beach or better. you'll be happier in the long run.

Re:sorta useful, but short of the mark

[Zathrus]

And not every PC is equipped with AGP

Well, every PC built in the past 3 or 4 years is... and, frankly, if your main PCs are older than that you're not likely to be reading ArsTechnica or something about a BIOS tweaking guide.

But like most 'BIOS' guides I've read, this gives alot of info on 'tweaks', with little mention of the damage that the wrong settings can do

Obviously a problem... I haven't read the article yet (didn't feel like it this morning, and it's toast now), but they should really mark the settings that are potentially dangerous. Screwing around with your RAM timings, CPU clock, etc. can release the magic smoke awfully quickly.

There's also a disproportionate amount of Soundblaster-bashing going on here

Not really. Creative Labs has long made the worst hardware they could get away with, and did so thanks to having created the original standard for PC sound. They've never been high quality cards, and have often caused problems with other hardware and software. Go talk to someone who tried putting an SB Live in a dual processor NT4 system about it for example.

Frankly, if you're looking for a new soundcard then there's little reason to buy Creative. For general use (games/music) both Hercules and Turtle Beach make better cards for less. For games alone, Hercules or Philips are better (Philips mentioned purely due to QSound). If you're talking about just playing music, doing a home theater PC, or mid to high end audio then a more expensive card that does real 24/96 or 24/192 audio is preferred - M-Audio and many others fit the bill here.

I do think that the incompatibility bit is somewhat overstated (I don't have any problems with my SB Live or my much older SB64 ISA), although SB's are notoriously bad about sharing PCI IRQs and the like, but the poor sound quality and total lack of compliance to industry standards are not. The digital out on the Live series doesn't comply to any spec known to man -- its voltage is roughly 10x the allowed spec. Even the Audigy continues to resample everything to 48 KHz, which plays hell with CD Audio, and their claims of 96 KHz sampling rates are deceptive at best (only applies to the digital outputs, and only sometimes at that).

If you want more details, I suggest either the PC AV Tech or [H]ardOCP's Audio forum. If you're interested in HTPC's in particular, then take a look at AVS Forum's HTPC forum.

Re:sorta useful, but short of the mark

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the weirdest problem with a soundblaster 64 in a 1.5GHz P4. The machine should be plenty fast enough, yet the sound stutters whenever I compile something (which is often - this is at work). It is annoying I cannot listen to my MP3's in good quality - anyone else ever experienced this?

Oh, the 'OS' is Windows ME...

Re:sorta useful, but short of the mark

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh God your not one of those annoying TB fanboys are you? Its funny how probably over 50% of the Sound cards out there are SB Live's and they all work perfectly. Yet people like you feel the need to constantly tell us how they are inferior.

Whatever.

Re:sorta useful, but short of the mark

[Anonymous Coward]

Sound Blaster Live cards like this to be enabled. It essentially removes 1MB of your RAM, so consider replacing the sound card instead."

Yeah, it would suck to have only 511 megs available ... later on ...

They always just tell you what the fastest possible setting is, but never mention "if your hardware doesn't support it, you'll wreck it". Personally I think sacrificing stability for the sake of a 1% theoretical boost in performance is bad mojo.

(-1, Contradicts itself)

Good troll, though! You managed to fool most of the people here.

PS - Creative's stuff sucks not because it's unstable. Thier stuff sucks because you pay 3 times as much for a hissy, shitty mess. Heh. And losers like you eat it up because they were there for you when your PC-AT needed boops and blips to even be in the same league as the rest of the computer industry.

Re:sorta useful, but short of the mark

[Anonymous Coward]

Person #1: My SB Live is the best card in the world. I don't know why anyone would buy anything else.

Person #2: Actually, there are other companies making equivalent or better cards and pricing them lower.

Anonymous Coward Troll: FANBOY! CREATIVE RULES! BEST SOUND CARDS IN AMERICA! (by total sales volume)

Re:sorta useful, but short of the mark

[Anonymous Coward]

Creative Labs has long made the worst hardware they could get away with, and did so thanks to having created the original standard for PC sound.

Nope, they can't even claim that -- they did so thanks to being cheaper than the original.

The first SB card was a clone of the more expensive AdLib, with one added feature that I can't remember right away, and without the composing software.

Re:sorta useful, but short of the mark

[Anonymous Coward]

"Anonymous Coward Troll: FANBOY! CREATIVE RULES! BEST SOUND CARDS IN AMERICA! (by total sales volume)"

Hey moron I never said they were the best. I simply said they are the most popular sound card and most people never have any problems with them.

Kthnxbybye

No say doh and go shit yourself :-)

Re:sorta useful, but short of the mark

[Broccolist]

There's also a disproportionate amount of Soundblaster-bashing going on here. Apparently my SB Lives have been crashing my systems and suffering poor sound latency for the last couple of years. Funny that I never noticed.

Lucky you. The SB Live crashed my system. It instantly destroyed my previously rock-stable W2K installation as soon as I plugged in the card and rebooted. I'm not touching that crap anymore. Anyway, keep on laughing for now, but keep in mind who to blame the next time your system goes horribly wrong.

Re:sorta useful, but short of the mark

[Zathrus]

Which part of the statement where I said I owned both an SB Live and an SB64 (SB AWE64 to be technical) did you miss?

Which part of the statement in which I recommended a variety of sound cards, not just a TB (and, in fact, I recommended Hercules twice while only mentioning TB once)?

And, know what, they don't all work perfectly. If they did there wouldn't be the complaints. Do they work "well enough" for most people? Sure. But so does onboard sound. If you're going to buy a soundcard at this point, you should take the time to learn what's out there and why it's even worth buying one. Otherwise you're just throwing your money down the toilet.

Re:sorta useful, but short of the mark

[Zathrus]

The SB added digital sound recording and playback. The AdLib was just a very cheap 8-bit MIDI synth, so it was fine if you wanted music, but useless if you wanted to do sound effects, speech, etc.

The original SB wasn't cheaper either -- it was actually a good bit more expensive. But the feature it added was worth the expense, and as the first ones out of the gate they set the standard for digital sound. It didn't become a moot point until late in the Win3.x/early Win95 days when the drivers got reliable enough (and DOS games started becoming rare enough) to use a single interface that utilized whatever card you had.

And even then some companies took forever to get it right -- Turtle Beach being notorious for issues with some of the earlier cards.

Re:sorta useful, but short of the mark

[Anonymous Coward]

8 bit card, but not an 8-bit synth.

It was a Yamaha OPL-3, IIRC. FM synthesis. Not digital.

Re:Fragged

[timmyf2371]

/me thinks the /. editors decided to post another link to this site as revenge for the previous dubious story.

Tim

great!

[jeffy124]

now if only Ars Technica would apply those BIOS settings to their servers, they wouldn't be slashdot effect victims, and I'd be able to read the article!

I'll probably regret this...

[Camulus]

but I should have a pretty hefty server. I was copying the whole thing into a text file for myself. So, let's see if my server gets slashdotted. It's only 15k, so I hope not, besides, I need to use up my 40 gig of through put this month.
ArsTechnicaBiosGuide.zip

Re:I'll probably regret this...

[orki]

@time it still works hehe

Re:I'll probably regret this...

[Ripplet]

No regrets, you saved me some work there. Except I'm now in for a long tweaking session tonight. Cheers dude.

Re:I'll probably regret this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Still worked for me at the time I posted this.

Let me guess..

[tangent3]

Optimizing your BIOS settings is not enough to prevent your server from being slashdotted...

Re:European Shitheads

[atarian]

WTF does this have to do with BIOS tweaking?

./ Cache Needed!

[doublem]

Have a listing of ./ users who have server space and are willing to provide a cache. When a site is about to be posted, an e-mail is sent out giving those users 5, 10, 15 or whatever min to mirror the site. As the posted site is ./ed, these "cache ./ers" post links to their mirror.

I would like to be the first ./ cache user, and would happily mirror sites for ./ use.

Re:./ Cache Needed!

[Ripplet]

./ ??? I think you've gone up a level too many there. I think maybe you mean /. :)

Re:./ Cache Needed!

[Kredal]

Not only does this idea get mentioned every single time a site is slashdotted, but you can't even spell the name of the site correctly, given two whole characters. /.

Get it? "Slash dot". Not "Dot slash".

Re:./ Cache Needed!

[doublem]

D'Oh!

Re:./ Cache Needed!

[Anonymous Coward]

C'Mon man, take it easy!. Some of us are unix people here. ./ is a hard habit to break for those of us who live in command line world...

If there is a slash dot, we like to call it ./ ./[some script name] is typed by me, more than I like to admit, in one day. /. is an alien key sequence. As a developer, I do manual testing all day.

I probably type ./ more than 4 times a minute sometimes.

Just giving you perspective on one way this might happen...

l8,
AC

Re:./ Cache Needed!

[henni16]

but you can't even spell the name of the site correctly, given two whole characters. /. Get it? "Slash dot". Not "Dot slash".
Well, since a cache works as a mirror,
./ is close enough for me. Of course, the only accepted name for a slashdot cache
(thinking of the recent "elgoog" article and lots of posts suggesting "mirrored fonts")
would have to be Dot Backslash..

Two arstechnica links at once

[_UnderTow_]

Wow, I guess somebody figured that since ars could surive one slashdotting you'd hit them with not one but two stories on /.'s front page at the same time.

How useful is this for the average Linux user?

[bahamat]

Seeing as how the Linux kernel replaces most of the functionality of the BIOS will setting any of these options really make a difference?

Any kernel developers out there care to chime in?

Re:How useful is this for the average Linux user?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, some of the options will, such as DRAM timings, but Linux reads a lot of BIOS settings at boot, then promptly re-configures them in a way which is optimal for Linux.

To be honest, you are not going to see a massive improvement in performance by tweaking your BIOS settings anyway.

The most effective way to increase performance is to use the most recent kernel and gcc versions, with relevant patches.

Re:How useful is this for the average Linux user?

[afidel]

hmm well 15-20% is a lot to me, this is about what I got when going from factory default to tweaked settings on my current gaming box, or about the same as dropping another $100 on the next best cpu. Since it took me about 15 minutes to figure out the best settings thats a really nice hourly rate =)

Re:How useful is this for the average Linux user?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you may have missed the point. Linux optimizes your BIOS settings on the fly when it bootstraps... Ever notice all that stuff that flies by before module loading begins? It happens a little too fast to read, but it is there. That is when it happens. Tweaking your BIOS manually, most likely has no effect at all, except to speed your startup by a few milliseconds. Since you probably don't reboot much, this savings is pretty much meaningless.

It doesn't save the BIOS settings (why would it?), so if you reboot, the settings changed by linux during bootstrap, are restored and you see the unchanged values in your BIOS setup program.

You may have made your bootstrap a few milliseconds faster by doing this, provided you set it to the same settings that linux does.

Why PCs still do use BIOS?

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK, the BIOS is a piece of archaic legacy... why don't put it away and choose something better?
Can't PCs use OpenFirmware or some other more flexible technologies?

--
I'm not an Anonymous Coward, here's my email: mosfet@ig.com.br. I'm just too lazy to register ;)
Sorry for my poor english!

Re:Why PCs still do use BIOS?

[turgid]

There is this effort OpenBIOS which tries to do just that. It's an independent implementation of Open Firmware, which is the boot code (i.e. BIOS) used on Apple and Sun machines (amongst others). What's really cool and geeky about it is that it's a FORTH system. There's a small nucleus of words coded in native assembly language and the rest is all portable FORTH!

Re:Why PCs still do use BIOS?

[Squarewav]

I dont know, maybe couse we want to run an operating system on it, and the OS needs a Basic way to access the input and output on the System most modern OSs use it for start-up and for fall-back mode if a device doesnt have a driver, as far as im aware EVERY system has a bios including macintosh(you just cant boot into it to change the settings), once the OS has loaded and started its own method of accessing the hardware the bios isnt needed anymore(unless the device doesnt have a driver and can beaccess thrue the bios)

Re:pf

[Anonymous Coward]

what's up with windows update ?http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/
seems to be down, someone been ddos'ing?

LinuxBIOS is the Best System Performance Tweak

[LuxuryYacht]

Replacing your legacy BIOS with LinuxBIOS yeilds the best overall system performance gains.

SPD, ACPI and PCI init and config is still quite a mess these days. Using an open source BIOS allows system performance to be tuned and maximized beyond what the usual legacy BIOS setup screens offer.

...you probably should

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that you can't just start hosting other sites content just for the hell of it, don't you? I can get to the site just fine (well, 'fine' meaning, it perfoms like sites after a thorough Slashdotting in the morning).

Re:...you probably should

[Camulus]

true... I just didn't think about it. I figured I would do something similar to the Google cache for this one for three reasons. 1) I already had copied the content and ftp'ed it to send home. 2) It is a link not on the main page of the site so I figured it would be fine. 3)I hate it when a site I actually want to read gets /.'ed. If Ars or any one has any kind of legal problem with it, I will be happy to take it down. However, since it is not a main link and since it is only about 15k and I have only received around 200 hits in the first 30 minutes it has been posted. It will likely be fine. Esp. since there is no other content on my web site as it only functions as an email and ftp space for me right now.

Re:...you probably should

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you leave it up if the site in question is running? It took me, oh, 1 second to pull the article up? Whatever problems they had are fixed, or so it seems.

Aren't There Better Ways?

[Spencerian]

The BIOS of the x86 world, in my opinion, is one of the reasons why we struggle but never quite reach a integrated architecture for PCs. Lord knows I've fought with quite a few of them, and hated having to remember to disable this in order to use that, with no guarantee that my change would work all the time.

Shouldn't our computers know what hardware it holds and configure itself automatically nowandays, with little to no user interaction? It would make all that "plug-and-play" stuff that's taken for granted on Macintosh systems, to site an example, true for my PC game box as well.

The technology is already here in the form of Open Firmware, which Apple uses as well as Sun. There is at least one company that has OF implementations for x86, but so long as Intel has a vendor lock on how motherboards are designed for their chips, I don't see this annoying and archaic method of maintaining a board going away any time soon.

OF is configurable enough for crazy whiz kids, if necessary. A better BIOS would make things a lot better for the OS and bring a better experience. Why can't we break out of the BIOS hell? Hadn't we learned the lessons from the Y2k-incompatibilities that some BIOS had, among other headaches?

Re:Aren't There Better Ways?

[turgid]

There's a free implementation being worked on here

Re:Aren't There Better Ways?

[Squarewav]

that was kinda true back in the 486 days, but most modern pcs you dont have to touch the bios if you dont want to ,hell the only configuration I do to a bios is setting up the HD info so the system doesnt take 30 seconds to auto-detect, could I tweek my bios to get a little more speed, sure, but I like how stable my system is and dont want to mess with it, as for macintosh just couse it auto-configures for you does it meen its set for the fastest speed, it could be but I dought it, of course its faster to auto-config on a mac when you have full controll of the hardware and know what the hardware is its easy, but in the x86 world of open hardware and bios's being genaric they have to acount for all your hardware that the bios wasnt written for

Re:Aren't There Better Ways?

[bored]

OF has its own set of problems. Most of which are much harder to overcome then the little anoyance the PC BIOS's provides. For example OF is written in an old Forth dialect and doesn't support interrupts. This means that all your nifty new high speed adapters need to run in polled mode. Quite a problem if the adapter hasn't been designed with polled mode in mind (most of them nowdays).

How about the fact that OF is really just a fancy PCI configuration and driver enviroment. This means that half of the work done by a modern bios/firmware (processor config/selftest, ram config/selftest, initial PCI bridge detection/selftest, etc) accually has to be done before the OF enviroment can even be started.

Anyway, OF was a great idea that never really had the kinks worked out of it. Like java, its cross platform promises never took off except in a few cases because the manufactures (Sun, IBM, Apple, others) couldn't get the basic services to behave similarly enough to the spec that OF pci cards just worked between vendors. Try it, buy some sweet fiber channel cards from Sun and try plugging them into your mac. I will bet money they won't all work. Try plugging a mac video card into your AIX box, I'm sure you can't find a single video card that works in both the mac and the aix box.

Re:Aren't There Better Ways?

[Anonymous Coward]

...to site an example...

The word is cite, fucknut.

Get it right.

Re:Aren't There Better Ways?

[Spencerian]

I have never experienced any problems with PCI cards and installation with OF. They just work. I know that sounds like the typical Mac-guy crap, but hardware installs are really made very strong by OF. Your comments seem to me that OF still would have a problem in handling interrupts and other bugaboos of a BIOS, which makes it sound like the problems are more inherent in the motherboard or the OS than the BIOS.

Sure, not everything works. Video cards are a good example since they usually require complex drivers. But interface cards such as SCSI work quite well, and there are numerous PCI cards that work in both platforms. I have a Fibre Channel card that is certified to work in both Mac as well as other systems. It's not that PCI devices can't be cross-platform--but most vendors don't write the drivers.

Right--OF isn't the "boot" of a system. On a Mac, that's handled elsewhere. So maybe mobos need to look beyond the BIOS for a better boothandler.

I have to disagree with you on one point: OF still IS a great idea...and is actively in use. But your points hold in that it may not be the best answer for this topic.

Re:Aren't There Better Ways?

[AxelTorvalds]

The problem isn't Intel. If anything, I'd bet they'd love to drop the BIOS too. Do you have any idea how hard it is to boot strap a PC from bare metal? There are tons of legacy tricks and almost secrets, it's an amazing excercise to go through; if you don't have one already, I'm not sure where you can even go and buy a high quality 16bit x86 assembler any more.

The problem is windows and microsoft. They can't boot without a BIOS. DOS, you know? Can Linux? It's pretty damn easy to boot Linux without one, pretty much put a kernel in memory and jump to the start of it. (No shit, it's about that easy) MS simply has never put a lot of effort in to getting away from the BIOS, they control the PCHEC specs, they can if they want.

More importantly, you can spend some change on a BIOS, last x86 embedded project I worked on we used a LinuxBIOS type BIOS because it was going to be $4 to $12 a unit to buy one off the shelf, plus something like $30k to $50k up front for their developers docs. When you buy a new PC a BIOS can be an expensive part.

I kind of suspect that MS likes it this way becuase it's all defined. The rules of engagement are pretty simple. There are only a dozen or so BIOS vendors. They work off of DOS, that's the benchmark for the most part. There are 2 bigger vendors who own the majority of the market. They all race to support new hardware and make DOS run on it. You take a step back and the only people that helps at all is MS. Nobody else needs DOS that much. You change the architecture and who knows who get's powerful, maybe somebody that's not friendly to MS. Expect it to become more of an issue as DRM becomes more central to home computers.

Re:Aren't There Better Ways?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, OpenFirmware is how the Mac boots. It's also how Sun Sparc's boot as well. It's the boot loader. The arguement about Sun cards not working in Macs is half-right, though, but it has to do with the actual firmware that's loaded on the card rather than anything else (Sun and Apple use different "words" for thier drivers). As for the talk about Firmworks, yes, these guys rock. And they know Forth like they were born speaking it. They're also relatively cheap to hire if you want to get a 3rd party card to work in your Mac that the manufacturer refuses to support. I got a quote from them for a firmware driver for a QLogic Fibre Channel HBA at @ $3000 for the driver (one time license). But of course, that's because I'm crazy and like to play with things I'm not supposed to. And unlike a majority of /. posters, I'm not a cheap bastard who wants everything to be free. Another reason I use Apple hardware. It may cost more, but it works, and I don't have downtime whenever I want to add a card, or upgrade my system. Shut down, pop the new hardware in, start it up. Maybe I have to install a driver (yeah, but mostly only on crap hardware), but more often than not, my Mac says, hello, you've added a new device, here it is, now what do you want me to do with it? And away we go. Video cards are even easier.
The biggest problem with OpenFirmware vs. BIOS is the size. Most card manufacturers want to keep costs down, so they only but an NVRAM chip big enough to squeeze the smallest BIOS they can. Apple's firmware for most PCI devices won't fit on the same space as a PC BIOS, hence, crap hardware, small BIOS = no Mac firmware. You could write a smaller firmware driver to at least enable the device, however you'd get none of the features of the card. That's the main reason why even the stock cards (nVidea, ATI Radeons, etc.) on Macs don't perform the same as the exact same model card in a PC. The manufacturer would have to make a whole new run of cards for the Macs since they'd have to put a larger NVRAM chip on the card. Most won't do this so you get a scaled back card. Trust me, I've seen what a well written firmware driver for a Mac video card can do. 120fps in Quake 3 with an ATI Rage 128 on a B&W G3. Too bad the NVRAM crapped out on the card though (still not sure why that happened, probably something to do with the fact that we flashed it about 100 times while testing the different revs of the driver). Back in the day when the Voodoo cards still existed, you could take a stock PC Voodoo 3 card and flash it with a firmware driver and it would work in a Mac. Now if only someone would do that for newer cards, most people wouldn't care about the difference between Mac's a PC's. But again, it's one of those things that takes a lot of time and effort and no one's really willing to pay for that much development and testing in today's slumping PC market. Anyway. Any venture capitolist's with a couple billion to blow feel like narrowing the gap between the Mac and the PC?

Re:Aren't There Better Ways?

[bored]

Sure, not everything works. Video cards are a good example since they usually require complex drivers. But interface cards such as SCSI work quite well, and there are numerous PCI cards that work in both platforms. I have a Fibre Channel card that is certified to work in both Mac as well as other systems. It's not that PCI devices can't be cross-platform--but most vendors don't write the drivers.

I'm not even talking about OS level drivers for the video cards. What I'm talking about is that they won't function enough to even display the OF splash screens or provide a text terminal. Besides, OS's that boot from OF and understand OF device trees should be able to function on the bare bones services provided by OF in a particular adapter class. In the case of a video card, if the OS cannot find a native driver it should drop back to the OF services to display its GUI. I don't know of a single OS that can accually do this, even though it is part of the OF spec. I question your statement that SCSI cards work well. I suspect that you have only been using mac SCSI cards in mac's. Try booting from some of those cards in a AIX box or a Solaris box. On the other hand I don't doubt that you have a FC card that claims its cross platform. There are cards that do work on more than one platform, they are extreemly rare though. Usually in these cases the code has a lot of checks to work around platform inconsistancies. BTW: I have done OF development work and I know people who make their money by porting OF drivers from one platform to another.

Re:Aren't There Better Ways?

[Spencerian]

Don't make assumptions. I've been using PCs before Macs existed. I also use the same SCSI cards in PCs as well as Macs, and under Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. Adaptec is the leader in this general area, my recommended professional preference, and makes cards that don't really care. Adaptec doesn't make all their cards that way, but perhaps that's really another topic: PC users buy commodity parts, and some commodity parts are not of hiqh quality.

It sounds like you want or expect to find a GUI or some configuration tool for these devices. My point is still that, in most cases, this should be completely unnecessary at the BIOS level. The installed device should just be recognized and allotted the necessary resources to operate if drivers are present in the OS, period. What you describe, in the case of a video card, does happen in the case of Windows, where it defaults to its built-in basic drivers when it cannot locate the card's true drivers. Same should happen in most operating systems (and is so for some).

I haven't used AIX or Solaris, so I can't form an opinion. Sure, things aren't a panacea. But it surprises me that these manufacturers don't review the good points of their competitors and integrate matters in their hardware and software. In the BIOS world, there is an OS for the hardware, and for the software, and these items don't talk well, and never have.

I appreciate your comments--hopefully, since all but Microsoft provide a UNIX-type OS, the days of the classic BIOS may find a way to change.

Re:Aren't There Better Ways?

[Spencerian]

Good points. It really is a vicious symbiotic relationship with Microsoft and Intel. Some Mac zealots, for instance, see Intel as a "villain" as many see MS. I agree that MS has more pull in maintaining the status quo. Intel just makes chips, and I agree with that they would kick the BIOS out as well. In fact, haven't they tried in various concept motherboard specs?

So it all goes back to the Linux/OSS "manifesto": Let MS burn, and the solutions will present themselves from elsewhere.

Re:Aren't There Better Ways?

[Anonymous Coward]

LONGEST. SENTENCE. EVAR!!!

Re:Aren't There Better Ways?

[bored]

I was talking strictly about Openfirmware machines. PC's are a diffrent animal. Often times a card will "work" in diffrent platforms if the OS has drivers for it and the BIOS/OF doesn't choke on invalid card firmware (if there even is any card firmware). This is another discussion.

It sounds like you want or expect to find a GUI or some configuration tool for these devices. My point is still that, in most cases, this should be completely unnecessary at the BIOS level. The installed device should just be recognized and allotted the necessary resources to operate if drivers are present in the OS, period. What you describe, in the case of a video card, does happen in the case of Windows, where it defaults to its built-in basic drivers when it cannot locate the card's true drivers. Same should happen in most operating systems (and is so for some).

Ok, then without a configuration tool, GUI or text, how do I select which device I boot from, in a list of CDROM, HD1, HD2, RAID, network, etc? How does my machine know how to access the device to load the OS and its drivers? This is one of the many strong points of OF over the PC BIOS. It works on a PC by having the user run though the adapter configuration screens (firmware physically stored on the PCI card) and turn on the ability to boot from the adapter (its called something like "install bios extensions" with adaptec). Newer PC BIOS's are somewhat aware of 3rd party boot devices and often have a SCSI/Other option which just leaves the int 19h (I think thats the correct interrupt) handler active instead of reaquiring the handler after the PCI firmware probe stage. In OF, the user is simply presented with a list of choices that are bootable. The PC bios 'hack' works because nearly all PC users never boot from a device that isn't on the motherboard and directly supported by the BIOS the machine shipped with. I should point out though that sometimes even motherboard devices arn't supported by the BIOS proper. I have seen dell's and other manufactures fire up what looks like PCI configuration firmware to configure onboard adaptec's, IDE raid controllers etc. This is because they don't want to waste the engineering effort to integrate an off the shelf device, with the off the shelf BIOS they bought.

As far as video controllers, well these often tend to work (especially on the PC) because again nearly all of them provide hardware compatibility to basic VGA text and raster modes. This is why those default "I can't find the driver" modes tend to look like crap, because they are 640x480x16. Sometimes on a PC your lucky enough that the video card has a VESA layer in its firmware in which case you can get 800x600x256 and some slightly better resolutions in windows. In this respect the PC's VESA BIOS extensions are similar to OF, which also provides basic screen drawing and manipulation routines for cards that the OS doesn't have drivers for. But, as I pointed out erlier this doesn't mean that your mac video card is going to work in a sun box. Unless something has changed on the mac, you still have to buy the 'mac' version of the video card. Often the only diffrence between the mac version and the PC version is the firmware on the card. If you have multiple heads, I wouldn't be supprised that a number of video cards are completly cross platform. You just can't use them as the boot display. Once the OS comes up and loads its versions of the drivers it could care less what is in the card ROM's.

Still all this crap wasn't my original point, which is that OF doesn't really provide the cross platform abilities it originally claimed it was going to provide. The firmware drivers simply don't work well enough to stick a mac SCSI card in a sun or aix box (all OF machines) and expect to be able to boot from an attached hard drive much less a tape drive. OS support for a particular adapter is another issue, execpt for my other point which is that it doesn't appear OF compliant OS's are good enough to even use the drivers provided by OF if they are present and the OS doesn't have a native driver. Sticking a PC card in a mac is the same problem except its not suppost to work. You might be able to load a OS native driver after the OS comes up but using the adapter to bootstrap the machine is just about impossible.

Best BIOS site on the net...

[xTK-421x]

If I have an obscure Taiwan motherboard, this place almost always has a link to find the latest BIOS for it:

http://www.wimsbios.com/

I'm sure it's old hat for most people here, but some people will probably need it to find their latest bios to use this guide.

Ars Technica Servers Still Crawling

[Anonymous Coward]

I suggest posting one more article from Ars Technica.

Let's try linking a file for download this time.

for more information...

[sc00p18]

Go relax with some good ol' Adrian's Rojak Pot.

Re:USB Keyboard And LILO-Disappearing keyboard.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I've noticed on the Abit KT133 MB with a IOgear USB-PS/2 adapter and latest Bios.
The keyboard will sometimes disappear. This happens under W2K & Linux. The only solution I've seen is to power-down and shut off power to the power-supply and restart from their. A simple warm-boot will not help.

Re:UBB Code

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, they do use HTML, your HTML just sucks hardcore. Try this instead. And you might want to see that little thing at the bottom when you are posting a comment that says "Allowed HTML:"

Latest Bios tweak

[Espectr0]

Install Winxp SP1.

After doing so, no OS could boot after doing a reboot. I had to turn off the pc in order to choose another OS.

Weird huh? I had to reset the bios in order to fix it.

Also, winxp install would BSOD'd out on my new gf4, so i had to pop in the older gf1. Problem is, after first reboot i had to continue the install with the gf4 to avoid another set of hangups.

To keep on topic, my asus a7v333 increased from 9800 to 10800 on 3dmark by just choosing turbo in the ddr settings in the bios.

Actual link to linuxbios

[casio282]

Strange that the linuxbios link provided above is to a commercial website. Here's the link to the proper linuxbios site, at linuxbios.org.

Re:Actual link to linuxbios

[kinko]

Did you even try that link?
www.linuxbios.org redirects to http://www.acl.lanl.gov/linuxbios/index.html, which cannot be resolved...

Re:Actual link to linuxbios

[casio282]

Yes, i did try it. It works fine for me.

Re:Aren't There Better Ways?-OSS Bios.

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing I'm wondering is has anyone with a mainstream x86 MB ever exchanged their old BIOS for one of the open bios's and gotten improvement, and did they have any problems?

It's easy to say one should change, but with little success stories being printed. People will not take the step, because messing with one's BIOS can FUBAR a MB easily.

Where do I find bios?

[pepperino]

Is it under File or Edit? I didnt see it under View or Favorites. I clicked on the Help one but it just laughed at me.

Re:UBB Code

[Anonymous Coward]

He's used to "god-damn message boards that don't use HTML" and therefore failed to turn off his UBB-tag mode.

I find the author rather uninformed.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Back then, we didn't have drivers"

yes we did.

"Long before the term "API" was born"

I have a hardware book on the original 8088 IBM PC published in 1985 that includes specs on the bios and boot loader software, and talks of APIs.

"You could call BIOS ROM routines to handle video, PC speaker beeps, the keyboard, and so forth."

That is, if you only wanted your program to be able to run on that ONE model of PC. To get to hardware, nobody programmed to teh BIOS, they programmed using DOS interrupts.

"Remember, in those days, people didn't build their own systems"

Yes we did. I replaced the mobo on my XT with a 386 mobo. By then the only original components in that box were the case, power supply, and keyboard.

The original 8088 mobo used jumpers and dip switches where we now make the adjustments in BIOS.

Maybe he's a whiz on modern BIOSes, I don't know. But he's sure clueless about primitive PCs. Knowing this, I have to take everything he says with a grain (or whole damned shaker) of salt.

Re:I find the author rather uninformed.

[mgblst]

That is, if you only wanted your program to be able to run on that ONE model of PC. To get to hardware, nobody programmed to teh BIOS, they programmed using DOS interrupts.

Come on, BIOS interrupts were more just as standard as DOS interrupts. And you needed them if you were writting an OS, or bootloader, or boot virus or something... There were a few things you could only do with BIOS interrupts - change the screen resolution!!!!

BIOS acronym

[XNormal]

BIOS == Built In Obsolete Software

Creative drivers have always been sucky

[Lka]

Thats no joke!

Creative Live/Audigy drivers have never worked properly on SMP machines, regardless of the operating system.

I have gone through all the Windows' (NT/2000/XP) and the Linux driver on several dual machines with different hardware and none of them work. The sound cracks, pops and skips randomly. It seems to randomly spawn multiple instances of the driver, one on every processor, which then conflict with each other. On Windows-machines it helps if you turn down all acceleration features but its still not flawless.

They are aware of the problem, have been for a loooong time, but just don't care. I wonder what happens when the "hyper-threading" Intel processors hit the market? Might get interesting :-)

Re:Broken Link

[turgid]

Oops, missed out the link. It's called OpenBIOS

shuttle Ai61 bords are screwy with soundcards also

[MadBurner]

I had massive bios issues on my shuttle AI61 board with my soundblaster card. it's all about choking shit off it seems.

Bios "Help"

[gnovos]

I love the "helpful" BIOS messages...

o ACPATI IEEE 9.0 compatability : ON | OFF
Help -- This settiong turns on or off ACPATI IEEE 9.0 compatability.

o CPU LIMIT PRIMER : FREE | POST | RETRAIN
Help -- This setting sets the primer for the CPU LIMIT

o DARNING PORT FLANGE : WITHIN | OVER | COMPLIANT
Help -- This setting alters the darning on the PORT FLANGE

Hmmm

[Jesus IS the Devil]

But will my windows machine reboot faster?

Ars Technica not so technical these days?

[h0oam1]

A quote from the article: SDRAM Command Leadoff Options: 3, 4 Yet another setting that's faster lower. Set it to 3 if you have badass ninja RAM. Set it to 4 if 3 doesn't work. Come on now... I think most people reading this article expect and deserve at least a *little* more technical explanation than that! This article is chock full of non-explanations.

Just what I want...

[Anonymous Coward]

A replacement BIOS that comes with no gurantees of functionality or that it wont render my system totally useless. And without a functioning BIOS, there's no (easy) way to fix the problem.

Re:Just what I want...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever heard of a flash programmer?

Please mod parent up.

[Arker]

He may be an AC but he's right on, aside from a common typo or two.

Best Bios setting

[oval_pants]

"Slashdotting" = disable.

It's a DOS thing (you remember DOS, right?)

[Reziac]

My SBLive doesn't do any of that nasty latency-related stuff either... but normally you'll only see that on VIA chipsets (it's a well-known issue there) and I run pure Intel chips. And mine works fine so long as its lame-assed DOS emulation is disabled. When that's enabled, it NUKES Windows, and doesn't work anyway.

As to the 15/16MB memory hole, IIRC (and IIUC) when it's enabled, it prevents any DOS program from using memory above that point, because DOS can't jump the gap like a fully protected-mode OS can. If you run big DOS games or databases in real DOS, this can be an issue, in which case the memory hole must be disabled or stuff won't work or will be really slow due to swapping to disk when it runs out of the first 15MB of RAM.

So it doesn't exactly "remove" 1MB of RAM; it limits DOS on your system to a mere 16MB usable RAM, no matter how much physical RAM you have.

Some older memory managers do the same thing.

changing the EPA picture

[steinerik]

I came across a page once that showed me how to change the EPA picture that's on the top right corner of the screen when you turn you pc on.
It will not increase speed or stability, but it's a nice little trick.

Personally I have a neat little picture of Tux, but for people that sell computers, I would believe that it's a nice way to advert their little company by having their logo there.

Description more links can be found here:
http://users.cybercity.dk/~dsl6178/bios/Bio slogo.h tml
or
http://www.biosmods.com/epas.php

Why does the machine even ask you these questions?

[raytracer]

Honestly, isn't your brain full of important things to think about? Wouldn't you like a machine which didn't needle you about details of its own operation that you don't understand? When you hop in your car, you don't expect to have to set fuel intermix ratios and timing to get out of your driveway, yet your computer manufacturer seems to think that you probably know better than they do what all these settings should be.

Consider the memory options listed in the article. Do you know what the 15M-16M memory hole is? Autodetect DIMM/PCI Clock? Bank Interleave? The article says Bank Interleave gives you a massive performance benefit, why then have an option to turn it off? What's the point?
Data Integrity Mode? Don't you think it would be nice if your computer knew whether it had ECC ram in it or not? Delay DRAM Read Latch? The article says that if you don't set it right, you can get crashes in your machine. Golly, don't you think manufacturers should just make the computer get it right?

Memory options go on and on and on. The only thing I want to know is that my computer can read whatever memory is installed at the highest reliable speed. I shouldn't have to tweak the no less than two dozen different settings to
get my machine working reliably, and those are just the memory related ones. A similar number awaits in the PCI and AGP configuration settings.

Legitimate uses of the BIOS are perhaps to enable or disable peripherals and to choose boot devices. It might also be nice to have a mode which shows what peripherals are installed. Other than that, I'm perfectly willing to allow the computer to pick out its working parameters. If the resulting computer proves to be unreliable, then the manufacturer should be out of business for making crappy computers.

Rant concluded.

Interrupts

[kyoko21]

After reading this article, does anyone get old memory flashbacks to the days of Int-13 and Int-20? :-)

Re:Why does the machine even ask you these questio

[cjpez]

God forbid some option might have both good effects and bad effects. And since when have you had to tweak two dozen BIOS settings to get your "machine working reliably?" What kind of machines are you buying that just don't work until you've done that?

Re:Why does the machine even ask you these questio

[Anne Thwacks]

Buy an IBM PC 300PL - it exactly meets your requirements,

And it will run any P2 or P3 processor (with a suitable BIOS upgrade.) No need for those really hot P4s. And you can flash the sign-on screen to be your company's logo

"Stolen from www.ourco.com"

might be suitable text or maybe

Linux stops here

bootable memtest86 cd? BAH! use lilo

[j3110]

Just add it to your lilo menu :) (You know you've done WAY too much tweaking on your system when memtest86 option of your lilo menu is the first one.)

Some advice for people on memory tweaking:

Don't boot a real OS unless you like to reinstall often. Even XFS, EXT3, ReiserFS, and especially NTFS will corrupt if you can't trust your own memory. Instead, boot the Memtest86. Don't stop there!!! Boot Linux and compile your kernel while playing Quake3 :) If you can do that, there's no problems with memory timings.

Don't forget that you can underclock your CPU and get better system performance overall by having faster ram. A lot of your computer's CPU cycles are wasted waiting for memory. Change the system performance option from "Optimal" to "Turbo" if you have it. Then keep trying tests until they all pass. Adjust your system bus speed down each time. Once you have a good setting, set it down a little more.

Make sure you don't go too far out of the PCI 33Mhz standard, or don't use an intel video card or various other cards that depend on this heavily. I had an I740 video card that just wouldn't work at any other setting.

Re:Why does the machine even ask you these questio

[Anonymous Coward]

> When you hop in your car, you don't expect to have to set fuel intermix ratios and timing to get out of your driveway, yet your computer manufacturer seems to think that you probably know better than they do what all these settings should be.

Well, since I *am* the computer manufacturer, yes, I do need to have these settings available to me. How does Soltek know what RAM I've installed, or which CPU, or ... ?

Homebuilders need these settings; consumers of OEM computers don't, and most likely shouldn't play with them.

Re:Why does the machine even ask you these questio

[Broccolist]

What are you complaining about? You're saying new computers from all-in-one providers like Dell shouldn't need BIOS tweaking to start working? Well guess what, they don't. But the BIOS doesn't hurt anybody, and it's still necessary if you want to plug old non-plug-and-play peripherals into your PC.

Yeah, yeah, if PCs had been properly designed for true plug-and-play from the start, BIOS configuration wouldn't be necessary. But they weren't, and it's no use blaming today's manufacturers, who are stuck with it. If we removed the BIOS, it wouldn't benefit ordinary users who never have to touch it anyway, and it would make it hard or impossible to

1. use legacy hardware on PCs
2. install alternative operating systems who need different settings than the default.

No wonder Microsoft is pushing BIOS-less computers, like the new Toshiba laptops which are painful to install Linux on.

In sum, BIOS access is harmless and necessary, and I can't see what you're complaining about. Do you think the hood of your car should be soldered shut too, so that you never have to look at your fearfully complex engine?

Re:GET SOME PRIORITIES !!!

[eno2001]

Yes... and posting a rant like this on Slashdot means you are getting on with YOUR life. Take your hand off your member, pull your pants up (your underpants too), and take a break from the keyboard. Wipe that jizz off your face while you're at it. Now, why don't you go volunteer for the charity of your choosing instead of being a wanker.

Reality check... [OK]
Cult member... [OK]
Logged in... [OK]
Troll... [OK]
Booyah!!!... [OK]

Re:European Shitheads

[Anonymous Coward]

you're a shithead...

Why FORTH?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the FORTH compiler is a very small piece of code.

Developing a small modulkar system is fairly simple with FORST too, since you merely define the dictionary you need to talk to hte hardware.

Re:Why FORTH?

[turgid]

Not only is the compiler a very small piece of code, but it's interactive too. You compile new "words" (i.e. subroutines or functions) as you go :-)

Triumph the what?

[LHorstman]

Do you mean Triumph the Insult Comic Dog? Come on, if you're going to quote such a legendary comedic figure, get his name right....

Re:Triumph the what?

[RedWolves2]

You heard of him too? That's great...

for me to poop on!

Re:Why does the machine even ask you these questio

[Anonymous Coward]

gee linux users complaining about a bios. you guys love to put non linux users down because they say "it`s to hard". well? how does it feel? yes the bios is a pain in the butt, but WE are all in the same boat when it comes to setting up the bios. i don`t see people putting someone down because they are having a problem with the bios, but any newbie trying (struggling) to set up linux and you guys snicker and laugh! until the average joe can take a cdrom and just click like installing windows your not gonna get embraced by the masses. pity.

"I'm perfectly willing to allow the computer to pick out its working parameters. If the resulting computer proves to be unreliable, then the manufacturer should be out of business for making crappy computers."

isn`t RIAA, MPAA, Bill Gates and DRM trying to do the same thing? only they want to "control" what you can do. think real hard about it. if or when DRM becomes a reality do you really want to give up your last remaining ability to choose for yourself how you want to setup your machine?

Weird BIOS settings on ASUS A7V333

[fotoguzzi]

I was poking around the Vcore settings on my ASUS board with an Athlon XP 1700 processor. The settings range from the expected 1.675V - 1.85V, but if you hold down the righthand Alt key and then Page Up and Page Down, you get values ranging from 500kV to 1.5MV in 50kV intervals.

Does anyone know why these settings should exist?

Re:Weird BIOS settings on ASUS A7V333

[hackerm]

Hmmm. Maybe it's used to test processors designed to be powered by Tesla coils? :)

Don't tweak your ram latency settings

[mamba-mamba]

I suggest that you don't change any of your RAM latency settings, and if you do, make sure you test your system very thouroughly before you trust it.

The latencies (and a variety of other stuff) are spec'd by the RAM chip manufacturer (which means you can look them up for yourself if you read the chip number off of the RAM chips on your DIMM) and stored in a small ROM on your DIMM. Whoever designs the DIMM has to put the right info in the ROM. Then, during bootup, the BIOS is supposed to read these settings from the ROM using the SMBus protocol, and configure the chipset accordingly. This whole process is called Serial Presence Detect, or SPD. It is mentioned in the PC-100 RAM (and subsequent) specifications. In fact, I think it is now a JEDEC spec.

While I don't know for sure, I would guess that most DIMM and BIOS designers did this right. (I know I did when I had to do it ;-)

MM
--

Hey, troll... Haiku for you!

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiotic cunt
Too dumb to keep his mouth shut
We all laugh at him

Secrets of Street Magicians revealed..

[Frank of Earth]

.. was better cause of the hot chicks. Throw some half nude chicks in the book and maybe I'll read it. Otherwise, Ill continue just to read about bios tweaks from skarky, hardocp, anand and even Tom.

[stupid ass wait 2 minute /. rule and then you hit the back arrow and your post is gone so you have to retype the damn thing again.. argh! Excelling karma get's you shit. Penalize the stupid, not those who can think and type at the same time {of course, someone will point out a mistake in this post since I don't have the patience to proof read it, again}]

The article starts out with misinformation

[Anonymous Coward]

I tend to apply the "13-O-Clock" principle; when the clock srikes 13 O'Clock, I no longer trust it. The article has totally bogus information on the originas of the BIOS. If it can't get that right, what else might be wrong.

Just solder the hood shut now (Was: Re:Why doe...)

[Ellen Ripley]

Do you think the hood of your car should be soldered shut too, so that you never have to look at your fearfully complex engine?

Sadly, most people do think this. People want all their problems solved by somebody else. They don't have a sense of responsibility for their own lives.

Proof: The whole history of humankind. People serve government and they like it that way. People are happy to abandon ethical responsibility to an imaginary invisible man in the sky who supposedly made the universe.

More Proof: The statement that gets me in more trouble bar none than any other. It isn't that I think Nazi's have the right to express themselves, even when it's pure genocidal hate speech... it isn't that I believe the best government is no government... it isn't that I think individuals should be allowed to own atomics for when government gets uppity... it isn't that I think that doors that slam too fast should be left that way because slow people losing fingers is Evolution In Action(tm).

It's my belief that learning is the responsibility of the learner, not of the teacher. Nothing generates as many responses, as quickly and with as much frustration, as this one belief of mine, that you are responsible for educating yourself.

That sort of person is never going to want to spend time configuring their BIOS, maintaining their car, or doing anything else they weren't told to do.

Ellen

Re:Just solder the hood shut now (Was: Re:Why doe.

[solferino]

It's my belief that learning is the responsibility of the learner, not of the teacher.

yes, good point and i agree - futher i think the word teacher has unfortunate victorian connotations of some kind of instiller of knowledge - really a teacher should mostly be a facillitator of learning

if you've ever taught you may have noticed that the best students do assume responsibility for their own learning

also if you've ever taught you may have experienced what a weird vibe you get being a teacher and how ppl treat you differently in that role - 'great teacher, fill my head with the things i need to know' - and how this can start to warp your mind in unpleasant ways, and if you're not too careful you'll find yourself ten years down the track, some awful charicature of a victorian pedagogue

finally i recommend ivan illich if you want to think fresh thoughts about 'education'

Better than the manual?

[BoogieChillum]

"Data Integrity Mode

Options: ECC, Non-ECC

You'll know yourself whether you need to have this set to "ECC."
If you don't know then it should be set to Non-ECC

Gee, that's really informative. So much better than those unhelpful, sarcastic old manuals!