BIOS Setup

Extended BIOS options are one of the three key features of Biostar’s T series mainboards. The BIOS of the TForce P965 is based on Award’s microcode, but has a few interesting peculiarities.

The unusual Menu in BIOS option attracts the eye in the first page. It is evoked with the F9 button. This is an interesting idea, but not quite well implemented. You are shown a page with the manufacturer’s thanks for the purchase, some outdated or at least incomplete information about the mainboard’s capabilities, and the pin layout of some connectors.

But if you are reading that, then you have somehow managed to connect everything right and successfully started the system up, and all that information is useless for you. It would be better to have some tips on configuring the BIOS instead.

The BIOS sections are titled according to their contents. There’s nothing unusual here: Standard CMOS Features, Advanced, Integrated, and PC Health Status. Let’s go into the latter one.

Theoretically, the mainboard can control the CPU fan speed, but I didn’t spot any changes during my tests. Perhaps a 4-pin fan is required for this feature to work correctly. That’s a drawback, of course. What’s good is that the main system parameters can be monitored during the startup procedure:

This feature has been traditionally available on EPoX mainboards: if a parameter deflects too much from its nominal value, it is highlighted in red and you have time to enter the BIOS and correct the settings. The drawback of Biostar’s implementation is that this information is shown after the POST and after the screen is refreshed, right before the OS begins to boot up. So, you can only read this information, but can do nothing about it, as opposed to EPoX mainboards.

The next BIOS section you may be interested in is called Overclock Navigator Engine. This section contains options necessary to overclock the CPU as well as memory. This is good as you don’t have to move around several sections to make all the changes.

Entering this section you can see one more good point of the Biostar TForce P965. It shows the current values of parameters like multiplier, frequencies and voltages in a straightforward format.