Video BIOS Cacheable

Common Options : Enabled, Disabled

Quick Review

This BIOS feature aims to further boost the performance of a shadowed video BIOS by caching it using the processor's Level 2 cache. It works in conjunction with Video BIOS Shadowing and is only valid when Video BIOS Shadowing feature is enabled.

If this BIOS feature is enabled, a 32 KB block of the video BIOS from C0000h-C7FFFh will be cached by the processor's Level 2 cache. This greatly speeds up subsequent consecutive accesses to the video BIOS.

If this BIOS feature is disabled, the video BIOS will not be cached. The video BIOS will be read from the system memory (if it has been shadowed) or directly from the BIOS chip.

However, caching the video BIOS does not necessarily translate into better system performance. First of all, modern operating systems like Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Windows 7 do not need to use the video BIOS. They bypass the BIOS completely and use the graphics card's driver instead. Therefore, absolutely no benefit can be realized by caching the BIOS.

As with the Video BIOS Shadowing feature, Flash ROM upgrades should not be attempted if the video BIOS is cached. If the video BIOS is cached, any attempt at flashing the video BIOS will likely result in a system crash. Worse of all, since only 32 KB of the video BIOS is cached, the end result is usually a corrupted video BIOS.

Therefore, it is recommended that you disable Video BIOS Caching, even if you play a lot of real-mode DOS games or work with operating systems running in fail-safe mode.

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