BIOS video questions

[kasplat]

I just got a P4C800-E Deluxe, P4 2.8C, 512MB Kingston PC3200 RAM, and a Sapphire 9600 Pro Ultimate. SmartGard in the ATI control panel lets me turn on Fast Writes, but after a reboot it is always turned off. I'm pretty much a BIOS newb, so apologies for the basic questions, but I thought I would check to see if anything obvious was set wrong. I'm currently running Win2K Pro, so Hyperthreading is turned off.

Looking at the Advanced/Chipset settings, the defaults are:
Configure DRAM timing by SPD: Enabled
Performance Acceleration Mode: Auto
DRAM IDLE Timer: Auto
DRAM Refresh Mode: Auto

Graphics Aperture Size: 64MB
Spread Spectrum: Enabled
ICH Delayed Transaction: Enabled
MPS Revision: 1.1

I put the DRAM info above just for reference; I'm not looking to overclock since stability is more important than getting the last ounce of performance, but if I can keep the system rock solid, tweaking is fine with me.

I don't see any option for enabling Fast Writes. IIRC the Aperture size is sort of pointless on Win2K, so if dropping that back to 32 or 16MB would free up some RAM and not negatively impact performance I would like to change it. The other items I have no clue as to what they do, so an explanation and recommended setting would be appreciated.

Once again this started with wanting to enable fast writes but maybe that simply isn't possible. SmartGard does show the AGP running at 8x.

Thanks,

ka

 

[kasplat]

Argh, apologies for this not going into the official P4C800 topic, I must have hit New Topic instead of Reply. My bad.

ka

 

[Buz2b]

You would get a ton of info from this site. In essence, this does nothing to free up RAM but you should read up on that and other settings. Good Luck!