BIOS

Biostar TP35D2-A7 mainboard uses Phoenix-Award based BIOS.

However this BIOS is not quite common, it has a number of unique distinguishing features, typical only of Biostar mainboard. For example, by pressing F9 you can access the so-called “Menu in BIOS” with a little bit of not very useful info.

The first BIOS sections offer pretty standard set of functions: you set the boot-up devices order, adjust processor power-saving parameters, keyboard work mode, logo display, etc. I had to dwell on the Integrated Peripherals section. As you can guess from the name, this section allows adjusting the work modes for USB devices, COM and LPT ports, and integrated onboard network controller. Here everything is fine, but when I got to the page with hard disk drive settings, I couldn’t find any options for SATA modes.

The Serial ATA hard disk drives are by default set compatible with IDE on most contemporary mainboards, i.e. the OS sees it as a regular Parallel ATA disk drive supporting standard set of commands. It hardly affects the performance, however, if you want to take advantage of some SATA’s unique features, such as plug-n-play connection, for instance, they should be switched to extended AHCI mode. Biostar TP35D2-A7 doesn’t allow it, because there is no corresponding item in the BIOS, so the hard disk drives will always work in compatibility mode.

As for other anachronisms, I would also like to point out primary initialization of PCI graphics cards. I doubt that any of the users out there have graphics cards like that in their systems.

PC Health Status section that may seem quite common at first glance contains a lot of interesting and even surprising features.