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

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...

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

[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: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.

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.

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.