Not sure of what the chipset is, haven't opened it up yet. Seems to run reasonably well. The display adapter is a S3 ProsavageDDR, so it's not a nForce
Comes loaded with tons of worthless crap, a reformat is a must. Has 2 drive partitions, C: is 38gb, and D: is a 2gb restore partition. No idea on how to get to the BIOS, it doesn't even have a Compaq logo or anything on boot, just a black screen that loads the OS in a few seconds. And you don't get an XP home cd or anything, just a proprietary Compaq system restore CD, but you do get a serial. Doesn't take very long at all to boot, maybe 40 seconds or so.