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".

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

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.

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.

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?

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.