On Mon, 23 Jul 2007 18:27:37 -0700 Vicki and Dave Stevenson <vicndave@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Unfortunately I didn't have much chance to work on this over the > weekend, but it was so encouraging to hear from all of you. Thanks > Chris, Andy, Stan, Jim and Willem for your suggestions. > > I managed to update the BIOS (which was several revs old - ver 0502 > to ver 1001), and that seemed to be enough to get me past the > sticking point: running /sbin/loader > > and the installation is proceeding. How lovely it feels to be asked > what language I speak! great! > > I have some questions about some bios settings: > > 1) CPU Frequency > The default value is 200MHz, and the max is 400MHz. The BIOS utility > allows any integral value between those points [200, 201, ... 400]. > If I set to 400MHz, is that what is referred to as overclocking? Yes. > > Are there risks associated with this? > Yes there are. You can burn out your CPU unless you have it adequately cooled (and sometimes even then). Above certain speeds, because the voltages are lower to avoid generating heat, you can have glitches in cpu output. I recall that those values are the front side bus speeds and they are multiplied by something to get your actual speed. The motherboard manual should tell what those multiplier values are. You are pretty safe going 10 to 20 per cent over speed. But do a search for your motherboard name with overclock and you will find information from people who have already done this, and where they started to get too hot on the CPU or dropouts because of low voltages. You have to tweak the memory voltages as well and change values in the BIOS, and you can get failures in memory reads above certain read rates. Unlike the CPU, you won't destroy the memory from overheating, it will just fail to read correctly. Your machine will already scream. Unless you are doing something where fast throughput will enhance your user experience, the potential shortened CPU life with (extreme) overclocking is probably not worth it. If it was my machine I would definitely push it a little though. > > 2) Onboard SATA Type > Default value is 'IDE Controller', other options are 'AHCI > Controller' and 'RAID Controller'. I know I don't want RAID (at least > not at this time). Wikipedia says that all but the newest operating > systems can have some trouble with AHCI. Since I want to run VMWare > (or something similar) on this box to work on various platforms (XP, > vista, linux, 32 and 64-bit versions where possible), I wonder if I > should just stick with the IDE setting? > > Or maybe I should try AHCI, and revert to IDE later if I run into > trouble? Linux uses SATA as the default controller type, and if I recall correctly you had SATA drives so you will have to use AHCI, I think. I also recall reading on this list that IDE support was being deprecated in the kernel (the kernel will pretend IDE drives are sata with some massaging). The BIOS has to match the type of drive you have. > > Thanks, > > Dave >
