Intel Rapid BIOS Boot

One of the features of this board, and I would assume a standard feature of the latest Intel motherboards, is a greatly reduced boot time. The product brief I received with the motherboard claims that the rapid boot optimizations can give a boot time of under 20 seconds, depending on system configuration. Running a fresh copy of Windows XP, my test system reached the desktop in 25 seconds. Turning the optimizations off gave a boot time of 32 seconds. As far as I could see, all that the optimizations do is not bother to count up the ram, and just accept what the dimms identify themselves as. The boot times are still very good, an Asus A7N8X took 38 seconds to boot. A 25 second boot time is certainly a bonus, and I haven't seen boot times that low since the days of Windows 3.1. Most of us only boot up our computers once a day though (Spode: or once a month in my case!), so whilst its a nice touch, its hardly the sort of feature that would sway anyone's buying decision.

BIOS recovery

The D865PERL has the ability to recover from a failed BIOS update, by booting from a tiny read only part of the BIOS, which contains just enough information to read a file from a floppy disk and perform the flashing process. The engineering sample I received contained a note telling me the BIOS on the board was a pre-production one, and I needed to update it. This gave me the opportunity to test the BIOS recovery feature. It worked marvellously, completing the whole procedure in about 3 minutes. Booting in recovery mode requires setting a jumper on the board, and then the whole process is automatic. The read only section of the BIOS doesn't even include a VGA driver, so the only indication of activity is a series of beeps, and floppy disk access. Once it was done, the board turned itself off. On booting the board again, I found the update was entirely successful. On a related note, Intel now produce a Windows based BIOS update program. I didn't have the opportunity to test this however.

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