Giga-Byte G-MAX TA4 Mini PC Review - The BIOS

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The BIOS on this system was nothing to go woolly about; it was basically a standard Award BIOS, featured in other Giga-Byte systems. The items of note were the voltage and overclocking options available. These were nothing spectacular really, and useless for the purposes of this review. This system is marketed, aimed at, and created for people with business needs and not much space.

Looking at the system temperature didn’t make me feel any better about overclocking this thing: at regular operations, this thing was already at 53 degrees Celsius*. Although it has a well thought out cooling scheme - the system fan and blow hole being right above the heat sink - the size of the encasing is not conducive to overclocking, at least if you want to keep the case the way it is. Having a P4 2.8GHz with just a 120 watt PSU backing it up doesn’t do much for my long term expectations in the overclocking arena. In short, this is not a PC that an enthusiast would want to use for that purpose (unless you just want a good challenge).

*It should be noted that the temperature gauged was at my home, with the computer between my 19-inch CRT and a sub-woofer. In a more open and cooler setting the system ran at a much more comfortable 45 degrees Celsius.

Fig. 1 - BIOS Home Screen

Fig 2. - Standard CMOS Features

Fig 3. - Advanced BIOS Features

Fig 4 - Integrated Peripherals

Next: TA4 BIOS, Part 2 >>
 

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