BIOS settings

[quicksilk]

Question?

What are the recommended BIOS settings for my motherboard to give me the best experience with my NVIDIA based graphics card?

Answer!

There is no industry standard among motherboard manufacturers for BIOS options. Each motherboard manufacturer will feature different BIOS options which work best with their products. The following recommended settings are BIOS settings when used with NVIDIA based graphic cards. If these options are not present in your motherboard's BIOS, or differ in the way they are phrased, please consult with your motherboard manufacturer for further BIOS setting information:

BIOS settings

Assign IRQ to VGA: Enable

PnP O/S Installed: Enable

VGA Pallet Snooping: Disable

PCI Bursting: Disable PCI Latency Timer: 128 Peer Concurrency: Disable

Video BIOS Shadowing: Disable

Video RAM Cacheable: Disable

USWC: Disable/UC

Pipeline Cache Write: Disable

PCI 2.1 Compliance: Enable (Only needed when using PCI graphic cards)

Passive Release: Enable

Delayed Transaction:Enable

VGA Boot Sequence:AGP (When using an AGP graphics card)

Graphics Aperture Size: 128MB (When suing an AGP graphics card)

AGP Turbo Read Mode: Disable

AGP Turbo Write Mode: Disable

[atomizer]

Omega

[svasutin]

Overall agp/pci/usb/isa spec setting

PnP O/S Installed: Disabled.

The Pnp standard refered to in the BIOS is the 9x specification for Win 95/98/98se. If you have 2k or XP, this should be disabled.

PCI settings

PCI Bursting: Enabled

PCI Latency Timer: Board Default

This is a "hack" used by mfr's to increase certain device performance. This controls the "packet size" for info along the PCI bus. Each device is allocated more time, thereby increasing a specific test. If you set it to 128, and only run an hdd, sound, or video test, you get a higher benchmark for the specific test. If you run a hdd + sound + vdo test, then you get a lower benchmark.

PCI 2.1 Compliance: Enable

Better be enabled or your board won't support irq sharing

Peer Concurrency: Enable

Ya, I multitask and usually have more than one pci device operating at a time. For example, most systems use USB and PCI devices at the same time.

Applies to CPU + RAM

Pipeline Cache Write: Enable

Disable only if you over-clock. Allows for faster refresh.

Legacy:

Passive Release: Enable

I look forward to the day Msft removes support for Super I/O and 16 bit devices

Delayed Transaction:Enable

I look forward to the day Msft removes support for Super I/O and 16 bit devices

Video Settings:

Video BIOS Shadowing: Disable

Ya, as cga isn't used to much anymore

Video RAM Cacheable: Disable

However, you might lose some sleep states depending upon the board. Uses k of RAM. On some cards you might see an increase, but it is specific to your system.

VGA Boot Sequence: The type of your video card connection

Graphics Aperture Size: Set to the size of your video card

AGP Turbo Read Mode: Enable [Edit] for 8x

If you get random crashes, first disable Fast Write

AGP Turbo Write Mode: Enable [Edit] for 8x

If you get random crashes, disable this one first, and then disable read mode

USWC/UC:

Uncacheable Speculative Write Combining / Uncached:

USWC should give better performance, this is the last thing to disable.

Edited July 17, 2005 by svasutin