BIOS setting question

[tcsenter]

Anyone remember the Socket 7 days? I have an ALI Aladdin IV Socket 7 1MB L2 board and AMD K6-II 400 that I'm trying to revive for a friend. I'm using a Diamond Monster Fusion PCI (Banshee 16MB). In the BIOS (AMI), there are two settings I can't remember how I should set:

Primary Frame Buffer - Set to select the Primary Frame Buffer.

VGA Frame Buffer - Set to enable the VGA Frame Buffer.

I'm accustomed to seeing these on boards with integrated video, but this board has no integrated video. So, I'm wondering, what the heck are they for and do they affect the PCI video card?

The options for Primary Frame Buffer are in Megabyte increments like [Disabled/2/4/6MB]. The options for VGA Frame Buffer is just enabled/disabled. Thanks for any advice.

 

[Peter]

These are acceleration features. Tell the north bridge how much and where your VGA RAM is, and it'll use a more effective method
of sending data down the PCI bus. The "how much" part is what you set in Primary Frame Buffer, the "where" part should be done
by BIOS itself. "VGA frame buffer" does the same thing to the legacy VGA area at A0000..BFFFF. Do not enable the latter, most cards
don't like it.

regards, Peter

 

[tcsenter]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the tips. Got it, VGA Frame Buffer is better disabled in most cases.

As for Primary Frame Buffer, does this affect how much local video memory will be reserved for texture memory? e.g. if I set it to 4MB, does this mean the other 12MB (4 + 12 = 16) will be used for texture memory? Or, is that a function of the VGA BIOS and driver?

 

[tcsenter]

And if the Primary Frame Buffer isn't what determines how much memory will be available for textures, what do you recommend I set the Primary Frame Buffer to? Up to the maximum amount of memory on the video card (16MB)? The choices are 1MB, 2MB, 4MB, 8MB and 16MB.

 

[ScrapSilicon]

<< Primary Frame Buffer. When enabled, this allows the system to use unreserved memory as a primary frame buffer. Unlike the VGA frame buffer, this would reduce overall available RAM for applications. >>

<--- that sounds to me like system memory...do you have at least 96MB of system memory(preferably more) ?

 

[tcsenter]

<< that sounds to me like system memory...do you have at least 96MB of system memory (preferably more) >>

No, this board can only cache 64MB of RAM, so that's what I've got. I'm using a PCI card with 16MB of on-board graphics memory. There is no integrated video, so I don't understand what use these settings are when your graphics and video memory are not integrated.

Phoenix (Award) describes the settings as:

Primary Frame Buffer - Select a size for the PCI frame buffer. The size of the buffer should not impinge on local memory.

VGA Frame Buffer - When Enabled, a fixed VGA frame buffer from A000h to BFFFh and a CPU-to-PCI write buffer are implemented.

 

[ScrapSilicon]

looks like you are about to experiment start with 2MB and play some games ...lol