Hi, Adrian, I originally sent an email to you about this, but I guess I should have asked you here (the forum link wasn't working for some reason, though! Maybe I was on an older page?), so here it is. I have a few questions about certain BIOS settings that I don't seem mentioned in your guide. These are on a BX chipset, although I don't know if they can be changed hot (I found them with WPCREDIT). What does " AGP jam latch strength (Enable strong pull down on/off), and (Enable weak pull down on/off)" mean? These are two separate settings. What does " SDRAM PWR" (0=3 dimm, 1=4 dimm) actually do? does it increase power or stability or decrease it? (I have a 3 dimm motherboard). Neither of these settings are available in the BIOS. And last (but not least): what is the "MECC strength 1/2 (1x, 2x, or 3x for values), CSb7# / cke5 strerngth (1x, 2, or 3x), CSA7/CKe3, MAA, MAB, and MD strength (also 1x, 2x or 3x?). These settings are available to be changed in not only WPCREDIT, but ALSO, in the BX tweaker "WBXtune", as well as " AGPset". I have no idea if they are related to the "motherboard driving strength" mentioned on your guide. There are also some other available strength settings, like DQMB1/CASb1 (1x, 2x, 3x), DQMA (7:6, 4:2, 0) which can take 1x, 2x, or 3x as values, too, CKE1/GCKe, CKEO/FENA strength (all 1x, 2x, 3x), plus a few other values that only can accept 1x or 2x: (CSa1/RASA1), CSa0/Rasa0, csa5/rasa5, csa4, rasa4, etc etc..... Any idea about these? I once changed all of them to 1x, hit "apply", and the computer blue screened and froze immediately. I have them all set on "3x" now, as it SEEMS stability is ever so slightly higher than on 2x...I had bluescreen crashes with Crucial RAM with "Burn BX" at 2x for all settings, changing all possible settings to 3x stopped most of the crashes, though it still eventually blue screened later.
Hello Falkentyne, I got your e-mail. But I wasn't free till today to do anything. As you can see from my forum posts, I just started posting today. Heh... Anyway, regarding your questions, there are certain things that motherboard manufacturers prefer us NOT to touch. As such, you don't see them listed down in any manual or even guides. I'll write down your queries and see what I can find out about them. But as usual, if I find out anything, I will post them directly into the guide. Thanks!
Thanks, Adrian. I should have said that the bluescreen crash I had, with crucial PC133, with those "Strength" values at 2x, when running the "Burn BX" stress test, only happened at a FSB of 150, so I was pretty nicely overclocked. Changing to 3x for all strength values (a few values can only go up to 2x) stopped the immediate blue screens, but it still blue screened several minutes later. Infineon PC133 doesn't blue screen at all at that speed...it just exits if it detects instability, which is what it's *supposed* to do. I suspect those values are all closely related to the "MD driving strength" of the VIA and newer boards, since both WBXTune and AGP_Info allow these to be tweaked. Of course AGP_info allows a bunch of stuff to be tweaked... (and there's documentation, but it's in Japanese...a lot of good that does
