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...

[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...

[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...

[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...

[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.

BIOS?

[Lawst]

Hmm, BIOS means Bandwidth Instantly Obliterated by Slashdot?

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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

Let me guess..

[tangent3]

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

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 =)

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!

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.

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?

[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?

[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.

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.

for more information...

[sc00p18]

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

Re:./ Cache Needed!

[doublem]

D'Oh!

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.

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.

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

Re:Broken Link

[turgid]

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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

[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?

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?

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
--

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'