Normally, I'd trust the mainboard manufacturer to choose the best options as defaults. But I had trouble with the board, because even with Quick Boot enabled, it booted twice as slowly as a Pentium 4 Celeron. Then I changed lots of options at once (most of them weren't explained in the manual, just mentioned with a single sentence) and the boot time is only marginally worse than the Pentium 4 (54 sec against 46 sec from button to pw entering screen). Now I don't know if I have turned something off which should have stayed on. I guess I even won't be able to boot from a CD now, because even though it is present in the boot sequence, I took off a timeout I think it needs to check whether there is a disk in the drive.
The second reason is that I don't have an internal HDD, only a SSD. I forgot my sources blush but I am under the impression that today's BIOS and OS options are geared toward booting from a HDD, which is often less than optimal when one boots from a SSD, especially when there are functions which cause avoidable writing cycles, as a SSD wears out after too many writing cycles. Most of the things I've read concern the OS, but there are some BIOS-relevant options too. I am especially confused about the disk mode. The board supports AHCI, IDE-simulation and RAID, but of the different articles I've read, there is a proponent for each and no clear arguments for any.
So can one tell me which options are important in general and which are important for a SSD-only system? I don't want to overclock the CPU, so you don't have to say anything about this (yes I know the board is meant for OC:)). I am thinking of overclocking the RAM, since they sold me 1600er heatsinked modules which are running at 1066 now, but I'm not sure yet about that.
The rest of the system: i7-930, Intel X25-m G2, 6 GB RAM, GTS 250, some no-name Blue-ray ROM. 2 external HDDs over USB 2.0. Lots of other USB-connected hardware (12 devices I think), no SATA 3 drives (will disabling the controller have an impact on performance?), no LAN, only WiFi. Lucid Lynx 64 bit, no dual boot, no virtual installations. The main uses of the system are: managing and playing/showing all the media stored on the external disks, lots of image manipulation, some video editing, a bit of (non-demanding) gaming, rarely development. Lots of Internet surfing too, but this shouldn't have much impact on performance.
