Intel P67 Motherboard BIOS

The Intel DP67BG motherboard BIOS isn't one of the fancy graphical BIOS implementations you'll see on other P67 motherboards. It's a pretty standard-appearing, Intel-sourced BIOS that still has some interesting features and gives you a great deal of control over various aspects of the motherboard. The Version 1596 supplied with this board was labeled as a "Beta".

The main screen gives you a look at the overall status and settings of the board. The 105Mhz "Overridden Host Clock Frequency" you see in this shot wasn't even bootable, sad to say.

The configuration section is where the "skull settings" are. The "Onboard Devices" section includes status and settings for the SATA ports, as well as the system monitoring section shown below:

You can examine and set the system temperatures and fan control here. The "Fan Control & Real-Time Monitoring" section allows you to actually set the low and high duty cycles of the PWM fan controllers, and the component temperatures at which various duty cycles activate. You can even control how rapidly the fans will respond to temperature changes (i.e. whether the RPM of the fans will change quickly or slowly).

The Performance section is where things get interesting. By drilling down into the various sections like Processor Overrides and Memory Overrides, you can exert very fine-grained control over the system.

The Boot section allows you to define the devices you can boot from, and the order in which the BIOS tries to boot from them. In an age of large, inexpensive USB keys, the ability to preferentially boot a USB device first makes it easy to keep emergency recovery tools, or even a Windows DVD image, on a USB key. The "HyperBoot" feature skips various initialization checks to make boot time faster.

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