cmos setup...best?

[Anonymous]

I have a question regarding how to set up the cmos.

Is it faster or more or less stable to set the addresses as cached, shadowed
or disable?

I have a AMI bios.

And what is the fastest and most stable or is that not possible set up for
all the other stuff?

Thanks

Jack Talsky

[Anonymous]

Jack,

If you're running Windows NT or 2000, you should disable all BIOS caching. The
NT platform doesn't use the BIOS for this, so you'd free up at least some
(albeit a small) amount of RAM.

As far as the other settings go, make sure that APM Power Management is Disabled
(Win2K doesn't support APM), and that you have the ACPI Control Register
enabled. MS says to turn Plug n Play OS to "Off," since that was really for
Win95 machines, and ACPI takes care of PnP in the OS. If you have NT, forget
PnP, APM and ACPI (and USB, for that matter) since they are all unsupported in
the OS.

Enable Quick Boot to get rid of the stupid RAM counter on bootup.

If your mouse is USB, disable the PS/2 mouse support to free up IRQ 12.

Set USWC (Uncachable, Speculative, Write-Combining) Write Post to Enabled.

If you have no IDE devices, you can also disable the onboard IDE controller,
which frees up IRQs 14 and 15.

There really isn't a whole lot more to do in the BIOS, except for tweaking
memory timings. Depening on your motherboard and model, you can do at least some
adjustments to overclock the system. On an AMI BIOS, you might see something
called a "Manufacturer's Setting," initially set to Mode 0. Stepping up to Mode
1-5 will overclock the Front Side Bus and give you faster processor speeds. On
my dual P-III 700, I think upped it a while ago to Mode 1 and got up to 833MHz.
Above that the system went South and wouldn't boot at all, which forced me to
use the flash BIOS program to reflash it, which turned all the default settings
back to normal .

Anyway. the only other tweak is to fool around with three settings:SDRAM CAS#
Latency (either 2 or 3), SDRAM RAS# to CAS# Delay (either 2 or 3), and SDRAM
RAS# Precharge (2 or 3). Systems using a FSB of 100 are set to 3-3-3, which is
the most stable. Moving to 2-3-3, 2-2-3 or 2-2-2 will yield faster performance,
but may also affect stability. When you look at RAM prices on the net, you may
see a feature called CAS 3 or CAS 2, which means that it runs at 2-2-2 at that
FSB speed (either 100 or 133 MHz).

Before going off on your BIOS, run the flash BIOS program and save the current
one to a file on a floppy disk - that way, when you hose the BIOS (and you
will), you can restore it to your pre-hose settings.

Matt
stachoni@bellatlantic.net

On Sun, 14 Jan 2001 15:57:34 -0800, "Jack Talsky" wrote:

>I have a question regarding how to set up the cmos.
>
>Is it faster or more or less stable to set the addresses as cached, shadowed
>or disable?
>
>I have a AMI bios.
>
>And what is the fastest and most stable or is that not possible set up for
>all the other stuff?
>
>Thanks
>
>Jack Talsky