Auto Configuration

All recent motherboards have now an auto-configuration setting leaving much of BIOS setup problems out of the user's hands, such as Bus Clock Speed and Wait States. On the majority of cases it will do just fine. But you must remember, it is not an optimization of your system's performances, but a set of efficient settings that will insure a good result. You will have to Disable this setting if you want to alter the BIOS yourself, otherwise your settings will be ignored. On some systems, you may get supplementary performances by improving over auto configuration settings, but on others auto configuration is all you will ever need.

Auto Configuration with BIOS Defaults

The BIOS defaults may not be tuned for your motherboard/chipset, but give a reasonable chance of getting into POST. Usually these settings are a good start to fine tune your system. If you did something wrong and don't know what, select this. It will replace your BIOS settings by default values. You will have to start all over again. Be sure to know your system's configuration. This option does NOT alter the date, hard disk and floppy disk configurations in the Standard CMOS setup, so in general you can expect your system to boot without problems after selecting this.

Auto Configuration with Power-on Defaults

When powering on, the BIOS puts the system in the most conservative state you can think of. Turbo off, all caches disabled, all wait states to maximum, etc... This is to make sure that you can always enter BIOS setup. Useful if the settings obtained by selecting AUTO CONFIGURATION WITH BIOS DEFAULTS fail. If the system does not work with these values, it's time to panic: the problem may be hardware-related (DIP switches, cards not inserted properly or worst, something broken).