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: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.)

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.

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.

for more information...

[sc00p18]

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

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: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.

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:Broken Link

[turgid]

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

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.

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.

Re:Aren't There Better Ways?

[Anonymous Coward]

...to site an example...

The word is cite, fucknut.

Get it right.