3.5.3South Bridge

HPET [Enabled]

Allows you to disable or enable the HPET timer. Configuration options: [Disabled] [Enabled]

3.5.4SATA Configuration

While entering Setup, the BIOS automatically detects the presence of SATA devices. The SATA Port items show Not Present if no SATA device is installed to the corresponding SATA port.

SB SATA Configuration

Allows you to set SATA options.

OnChip SATA Channel [Enabled]

Allows you to enable or disable serial ATA. Configuration options: [Enabled] [Disabled]

The following items appear only when the above item is set to [Enabled].

SATA Port1 - Port4 [AHCI]

[IDE] Set to [IDE] when you want to use the Serial ATA hard disk drives as Parallel ATA physical storage devices.

[AHCI] Set to [AHCI] when you want the SATA hard disk drives to use the AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface). The AHCI allows the onboard storage driver to enable advanced Serial ATA features that increases storage performance on random workloads by allowing the drive to internally optimize the order of commands.

[RAID] Set to [RAID] when you want to create a RAID configuration from the SATA hard disk drives.

SATA Port5 - Port6 [AHCI]

[IDE] Set to [IDE] when you want to use the Serial ATA hard disk drives as Parallel ATA physical storage devices.

[AHCI] Set to [AHCI] when you want the SATA hard disk drives to use the AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface). The AHCI allows the onboard storage driver to enable advanced Serial ATA features that increases storage performance on random workloads by allowing the drive to internally optimize the order of commands.

This item can only be configured as [IDE] when SATA Port1 - Port4 is set to [IDE].

•When the SATA Port1–Port 4 and the SATA Port5–Port 6 items are set to [AHCI], the information of the SATA connectors 1–6 can be seen only under the OS environment or during POST.

•For Windows® XP OS, you have to install the AHCI driver, so that you could use the SATA connectors 1–6 in AHCI mode under the OS environment.

•If you use a SATA optical drive to run the Windows XP OS installation disk, we strongly recommend that you install the optical drive to the SATA connectors 5/6 and set them to [IDE] mode.

Chapter 3

ASUS M5A97 LE R2.0

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