| Iwill DK8N
POST and BIOS screens
Now that the populated DK8N is sitting pretty in
the BT-90, we can power it up and see what it has to
offer. First, the POST screens:
As you can see, the POST screens are very
informative, detailing all the typical players,
their firmware versions, plus every identifiable
connected USB device. The bottom most POST
screen is the SiI 3114 ROM BIOS loading, showing the
connected HDDs, their capacities, and RAID arrays,
if any. You can't ask for anything more than
this. So let's say we hit
the DELETE key. You know what that means, we
enter the BIOS: MAIN
BIOS SCREEN:
Again, very informative, even for the first page.
Just imagine how that screen would change with
dual-core CPUs...
CLICK ON AN IMAGE TO FOLLOW THE VARIOUS BIOS
SCREENS:
As you will see in the
BIOS screens above, the DK8N BIOS offers plenty of
information and adjustability. However, there
are a handful of glaring issues though, such as
question marks in the USB menu, a completely blank
Hypertransport menu, and a strange lack overclocking
options previously found in retired Iwill boards
such as the MPX2. More importantly, there is a
lack of clear and concise documentation associated
with the multitude of settings in this BIOS, which
are sparingly found in the manual.
For example, important features
such as NUMA depend on the Node Interleaving setting
(must be OFF), and ACPI 2.0 being enabled. Uninformed users must read up
on other users' experiences or crawl tech sites and
manufacturer's pages to understand the cause and
effect of each little BIOS setting for maximum
performance, stability and desired behavior.
There were more BIOS issues. The DK8N normally lets out a beep for every
initialization of a connected USB device.
Sometimes the DK8N
freezes or stalls during this BIOS-based USB
initialization routine. A hard reset is
required to restore order. This problem
sounds familiar......Hmmm......I have a vague
recollection of this same hard-starting issue
occurring waaaay back with my good ol' DP533......
From POST to OS boot up, a
four-digit hex number appears at the bottom right of
the screen. This is especially useful when
attempting to diagnose strange pre-boot problems.
A slight nuance of the DK8N is its refusal to follow the boot
sequence settings as set in the BIOS. During
numerous attempts with different devices, the DK8N
only attempted to boot off the 1st device. It
did not bother trying the 2nd, or 3rd device.
The BIOS had to be re-tweaked so that the DK8N would
boot off the optical drive in order to install
Windows XP. At the next boot attempt, the DK8N
did indeed boot off the CD, but could not progress
to the familiar light-blue setup screen. I was
flummoxed. After a bit of detective work, I
had realized that the DK8N was having trouble
communicating with the optical drive. Going
back into the BIOS for the third time, I set the transfer
mode for the optical drive to "MWDMA2". Lo and
behold, it worked!
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