Dell Motherboard Question

[Gphunk]

I am new to this whole PC tweaking thing. I have been reading a lot, and talking with a fellow technician and have learned a few things. My question is, I have a Dell XPS T450 with the Intel Pentium III 450 processor. I was looking at the motherboard, and found a jumper labeled "bios configuration" When I switched it, my computer took me into BIOS, told me I had to set the jumper properly and wouldn't go any further. The chipset is an Intel FW82443BX. Is there a way to tell if I can configure my motherboard, or do companies like Dell not let you do that?

 

[birddog]

did they send you a user manual for your motherboard? Its been so long since I've owned a mass-produced OEM system, I've forgotten, what they include. Most OEM's have special motherboards that have little 'tweakability' since your average joeblow does not even know what a BIOS is.

 

[Vrangel]

I am quite familiar with that system.
There isnt many tweaks you can do with that BIOS, and this jumper wont help.
What exactly do you want to achieve?
If you plan to upgrade CPU ,I can tell that C533@800(with MSI slocket) works perfectly well on it.
BTW dont bother to update BIOS, latest versions do not allow FC-PGA CPUs.

 

[Gphunk]

No, I don't want to upgrade the CPU, I simply want to know if there is any way to get more out of what I have. Thanks for the responses!

 

[Vrangel]

Even if BIOS was full of tweaks, it wouldnt give much of a boost.
Your system is CPU limited.Here are Q3A timedemo results on some
low settings with different CPUs:
P3-450, 70fps
C366@550, 85fps
C533@800, 101fps

 

[goat]

This is a cool tool to find out what motherboard, and other stuuf, you have in your system:

http://www.belarc.com/Download.html

Saw it on Screen Savers.

 

[DataFly]

If your motherboard is anything like the one I had in my system until a few days ago, you won't be able to tweak much. The BIOS congiguration jumper (in mine) only added the option to choose the CPU speed, but changing that setting didn't do anything.

What BIOS revision do you have? A13?

 

[Gphunk]

I have the latest revision according to Dell's site: A09. I realize that usually stuff like this is probably pretty limited as far as tweaking goes, but if I change the motherboard, is the chip itself still not tweakable as a previous post says?