Once you've pressed the power switch, the system should boot up and you'll hear the fans spinning, the hard disk starting up and see the power LED light up on the front panel. If you look inside the casing, you'll see blue lights from the cooler and the DPS module on the motherboard. It will take a while for the system to boot, so be patient and wait between five to ten seconds, after which, the monitor should display the boot screen.
The boot screen tells you the processor speed and the amount of memory you have installed in your system. It will also detect the storage devices as shown. Since the SATA hard disk drives are installed to the Silicon Image controller and not the chipset's default ports, it will not show up on the main boot screen.
The boot screen above tells you that you have an Athlon 64 3800+ processor installed and 1,048,576KB of installed memory. One Gigabyte is equivalent to 1,024MB and one Megabyte is equivalent to 1,024KB. Therefore, 1,024 multiplied by 1,024 should give you the exact amount of memory shown on the boot screen. Also, you can tell that the system has detected that dual-channel DDR memory was enabled - which means that you have installed the memory in the right configuration.
Now, press the DEL (Delete) key immediately to go into the BIOS configuration menu. You should see the main BIOS selection menu.
The BIOS setup main menu.
At all times, use the arrow keys (Up, Down, Left and Right) to navigate between the items and using the ENTER key to select the item. Other keys include ESC (Escape) which lets you exit the current setup page to go back into the main meu, PgUp (Page Up) to increase numeric value (or change selection) and PgDn (Page Down) to decrease numeric value (or change back to previous selection). The controls in the BIOS screen are pretty standard although we would advise you check the manual to find out more about the control keys as it varies from board to board.
Press ENTER to go into the first option (Standard CMOS Features).
Standard CMOS Features
In this screen, you should adjust the date and time. You can leave the other items as default. If you do not have a floppy drive installed, you should 'Disable' it in the 'Drive A' field. Don't be surprised that none of the hard disk drives were detected in this page. Remember, we installed the hard disk drives to another controller, therefore, it won't be detected on this page. If you have installed the drives to the SATA0_SB and SATA1_SB ports, it should show up in the IDE Channel 2 Master and IDE Channel 3 3 Master fields. Though the drives are based on SATA (Serial ATA) technology, the BIOS has emulated it to look like an IDE drive. This is needed to keep it compatible with older legacy operating systems.
Here's how the screen should look like if you have the SATA drives installed to the chipset's controller.
The BIOS would have detected the two SATA drives if they were installed into the SATA0_SB and SATA1_SB ports.
Once you're done with the configuration, press ESC to go back to the main menu.
