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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."
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
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.
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?
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?
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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!
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?
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Or better yet, how about link back to the original, definative BIOS guide that Tom ripped off for that article?
d e/Index.htm
Adrian's Rojak Pot : http://www.rojakpot.com/Speed_Demonz/New_BIOS_Gui
It's in the middle of rev 7.0 now, but the 6.x series are pretty good.
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.
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.
"TK-421, why aren't you at your post?"
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.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Speaking of Tom's... After following the BIOS article (which is a very good read), the first forum I stumbled across was:
p c&s=50009562&f=77909774&m=8400979235
http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?a=t
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.
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. :)
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.
Get off my launchpad!
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?
Their they're doing there hair.