I just got the Abit NF7 S and a Barton 2500.
Even though I have 2 other Nforce2 setups using the Epox 8RDA+,
some of the bios settings for the Abit had me a bit stumped as to what to set them at.
So i went off and did some searching to find out the meanings of some of the settings.
Ive been through this thread, and see other people new to the Abit NF7 S asking the same questions i was trying to get answers to.
The answers are here, but it still takes a good bit of searching to find out what ya wanna know.
So heres what i have so far...
NOTE: These are copy and pasted from other various forums.
I DO NOT wish to take credit for other peoples work!
This is just intended to help others new to the board get setup and running.
Most of this info was collected from the
AMD.com under the ABIT MOTHERBOARDS section.
I would give credit for each individual bit of info, but i copy/pasted into a readme.txt for my own reference and never kept track of who supplied what info.
1) What exactly does "CPU Interface" do? (explanation meaningless: "if you choose enabled the system will use overclocked cpu/fsb parameters"... what does it mean)
1. enabling CPU-Interface will increase memory bandwith and reduce memory access latency.
So you should definately turn it on if it does not cause instability to your system.
some poeple report better o/c's with interface enabled, other better with it disabled, find what works for you.
Performance should be increased with it enabled but at the cost of some stability.
2) What exactly does "Enhance PCI performance" do? (totally absent on user's guide)
2. Enhance PCI Performance is for RAID/IDE performance it should give a boost in performance. This should be in the book.
3) FSB spread spectrum??
3. holds back overclocking by restricting emi, disable it if overclocking
Speed Spectrum is a way to offset EMI (electro magnet interference) created by the clock quartz crstal. By adjusting the value (higher) you can flatten the waves of the clock signal and thus gain stability that is if your system was having problems.
If you are O/C you will want to disable this feature as this can cause stability problems on a O/C system.
4) AGP spread spectrum?? (same as above)
4. as above
5) CPU FSB/DRAM ratio??? (explanation meaningless: "for example, the setting is 4/6, the memory clock will be the processor fsb clock divided by 4 and times 6" it doesn't mean anything!)
5. not meaningless, this enables you to run a variety of memory speeds asynchronous to fsb (133 / 4 x 6 = fsb 133, ram 200, or ddr 400)
any of the settings where the numbers are the same allow for synchronous operation
6) Ext P2P's discard time??? (totally absent on user's guide)
6. this was brought in in bios 1.4, to prevent sata corruption, default is 30us, if this fails to prevent corruption, drop setting to 1us
Disable cpu disconnect?? what is it? Will it slow down my cpu?
CPU disconnect is what you're talking about, and BTW it has absolutely no impact on performance. It simply helps cool the CPU by issuing a halt command when the CPU is idle.
CPU throttling is when the CPU is throttled back in the event of severe overheating. The threshold for CPU throttling is also adjustable in BIOS. Your CPU will not be throttled back unless the temp goes over that threshold.
CPU FSB / DRAM Ratio what to set it at? 3/3, 4/4, 5/5 etc
regardless of the fsb, these settings will keep the ram at the same setting as the fsb
Then why have all this different settings (3/3, 4/4, 5/5 and 6/6) if they ALL do the SAME thing?
good question......we've all been trying to work that out for months........
i done some benchies a little while ago, and although small, the lower ratios SEEMED to make a slight improvement in bandwidth on my rig, furthermore, i couldnt boot into windows with a 6/6 dram ratio, go figure
however, not everyone could reproduce my results, and the difference it made was small (around 5 mb/s)
they seem to affect stability, so just pick one that works and stick with it, 6/6 may be stable for some
4/4 may be stable for another etc... etc..