Step 12.1 : Configuring The BIOS

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 Cool-Plus northbridge cooler and the U-Plus DPS module. It will take a short while before you see any display on your monitor screen.

The boot screen tells you the processor speed, the amount of memory you have installed in your system and the various storage devices installed in the system.

Intel's built-in RAID screen will appear showing you two of the drives connected to the system. However, they are only single devices and have not been configured as a RAID volume yet. We'll show you how to do it in a while.

The Gigabyte GA-8GPNXP Duo motherboard also comes with a GigaRAID controller that offers support for another four IDE drives. Since we did not connect any drives to this controller, no devices were detected. We'll disable this controller in the BIOS as we won't be using it here.

The boot screen above tells you that you have a Pentium 4 processor running at 3.60GHz 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 menu.

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. However, we recommend that you install a floppy disk drive so that Windows XP can be installed directly with Intel's RAID driver through a floppy disk.

Once you're done with the configuration, press ESC to go back to the main menu.