[StixxUK]

OK, I have a Gigabyte GA-7DX motherboard (AMD 761 and VIA 686 I think - if that makes sense to any of you that know what you're talking about hardware-wise... as far as I'm aware, the former is the northbridge and the latter is the southbridge, but I don't really have a clue what that means ). I was wondering what the following BIOS settings do, since the manual isn't too helpful... In the section explaining BIOS settings, it says:

"Top Performance - Enabled: This enables the top performance setting". This ain't too helpful

Anyway, I'd like to know what the following settings do:

Top Performance
AGP Aperture size
HDD SMART capability

Thanks in advance!

[The flaming Cow]

well, I'm not very familiar with your particular Motherboard, but I would suggest you visit this site: http://www.itcp.net/~awsh/Speed_Demo...uide_Index.htm as a very guide to BIOS settings in general. They might have what you are looking for.

-The Flaming Cow

[deathstar13]

ill give it a shot.
top performance- is as ive read maximizes the board to run at its highest potential. ive heard its stopped some people in overclocking. my self it doesnt seem to do a darn thing!

agp aperature- tells your system your system how much texture memory to allocate to the card. id stay around 64 . unless you have a weak card then mabey 128mb

hdd smart capabilty-i have noticed in my benchmarks this does help. enable it. i use it with my raid system and i can get a large increase in perforance.it is a gigabyte thing. like top performance but this does help.

far as i know the top perf,and hdd smart are on gigabyte mobo's only.agp aperature should be in most bios's

[13oots2]

I have a GA7-DXR and Top Performance stops me dead when running my memory any faster than 120Mhz. SMART is a sort of self diagnostics, and has to be supported by the HD it stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology.

Some drive manufacturors using other ways of monitoring their drive. This is what IBM has to say about SMART

S.M.A.R.T. is a technology designed to enable a hard drive to predict impending catastrophic failure. S.M.A.R.T. is implemented in hard drive microcode. To use S.M.A.R.T., a system OEM writes software that reads the S.M.A.R.T. status at the ATA or SCSI interface and presents the S.M.A.R.T. status to the end user. In the latest S.M.A.R.T. revision, commands can also perform some self testing of the hard drive.

[StixxUK]

Top performance improves my 3Dmark 2001 score by about 150 3Dmarks (not inconsiderable)!