the stock nb cooling is good enough unless you do a volt mod, the southbridge can benifit from a passive heatsink but i run a vantec iceberq on mine.
the 1.4 bios is the newest, i get the best results from it but some people prefer the 1.2 bios. the 1.2 bios reports temps too high and the 1.4 reports about 4C too low for the CPU temp for me. the 1.4 also gives you the option to run your fsb up to 300Mhz but the board is pretty much limited to around 230Mhz (some go higher but around 230 is the norm without a northbridge volt mod)
on my board the VCore is actually undervolted by .05V (setting it to 1.85 gives me 1.8), the mem and nb voltage is pretty close to the bios settings. something to keep in mind when raising the voltage.