BIOS Features Setup
The BIOS Features Setup screen provides advanced features that control the behavior of the system. This setup screen is where the system hardware can be fine-tuned for optimal performance. The disable/enable features for advanced troubleshooting can also be used. Unless there is a good reason to change them, most of the features should be left at their default settings.

One important setup option on the BIOS Features screen allows the system boot order to be specified. For example, on newer systems it is preferable to boot from the hard drive or CD-ROM rather than from the 3.5" floppy drive as older systems did. Table summarizes the various boot sequence configuration options available for use.

Chipset Features Setup
Every chipset variation has a specific BIOS designed for it. Therefore, there are functions specific to the design of system boards using that chipset. The Chipset Features Setup screen allows the fine-tuning of the control parameters for the main system chipset. Recall (from Chapter 2) that the chipset controls the memory, system cache, processor, and I/O buses. Because of the potentially disabling nature of these settings, the first feature set choice is Automatic Configuration with the default set to Enabled. It is recommended that the default be left at Enabled unless there is a good reason to disable Automatic Configuration. The remaining features (System BIOS Cacheable, Video BIOS Cacheable, Memory Hole at 15m-16m, and Peer Concurrency) are not automatically configurable. BIOS and Chipset features setup will be covered in future labs.