BIOS

Like on most other motherboards the Phoenix AwardBIOS is used.


The first page is called Standard CMOS and offers settings to change date/time, HDD and floppy settings.


Advanced BIOS has settings to adjust general BIOS settings like typematic rate and additional bootup-delays. Also you can disable the full screen POST image here, so that you can see the full output of the system startup. On a subpage you can change the order in which the system will try the available devices to boot from.


On another subpage you can disable certain CPU features, like the C1E power saving feature. I like to disable it when overclocking. The Execute Disable feature of the CPU can also be disabled here. When using Windows XP SP2 enabling this feature might help protect against buffer overflows in software. An option to disable EIST is not listed here.

Memory Timings

The Advanced Chipset Features page has all memory timing related options. The options here are what is possible to set in the Intel chipset.

In older BIOS versions there was an issue with the tRAS setting. It did not set the right values. When "4" was picked in the list it actually set tRAS to 8. 5 is 9, 6 is 10 and so on. This has been fixed by the AOpen engineers very quickly after I reported it.

Under VGA Setting you can change the configuration of the integrated VGA in the i945.

Integrated Peripherals

As the name says you can change a lot of peripheral options on Integrated Peripherals. For example IDE settings and communication ports.


PNP/PCI and Power Management have no options that need to be mentioned. Everything is standard here.