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System BIOS cacheable

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mito   04-30-2003 at 03:07:09 AM

I have an ecs k7s5a mb, winxp, athlon 1300 and 512mb pc2100.
If I disable "System BIOS cacheable" in BIOS, will I have a performance gain?

I believe Windows xp/2k won't use BIOS at all, except if I boot plain DOS.

I'd like to hear your opinions. Thank you.

/\/\ito

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Prof133   04-30-2003 at 03:43:26 AM
- 0 +

<A HREF="http://www.rojakpot.com/bog.aspx" target="_new">Definitive BIOS Optimization Guide</A>:

Quote :

System BIOS Cacheable

Common Options : Enabled, Disabled

Details

This feature is only valid when the motherboard BIOS is shadowed. Since most motherboard manufacturer hardwire the shadowing of the motherboard BIOS, this is really a moot point.

Enabling this feature forces the processor's Level 2 cache to cache the motherboard BIOS ROM from F0000h to FFFFFh. This greatly speeds up accesses to the BIOS. However, this does not translate into better system performance because modern operating systems like Microsoft Windows XP do not need to access the motherboard BIOS. Everything can be done much quicker by using drivers to access the hardware directly.

As such, it would be a waste of Level 2 cache bandwidth if the motherboard BIOS is cached instead of data that are more critical to the system's performance. In addition, if any errant program writes into this memory area, it will result in a system crash. <b>So, it is highly recommended that you disable this feature for better system performance.</b>


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