Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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?"
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. :)