Once the board is installed and powered up, the task of BIOS setup begins. The well known Award BIOS has been used by Gigabyte for quite some time. Several features have been added to the 8I945P Pro that are also Gigabyte Standards. Those will be covered in more detail as we get to its owning screen.

     Here we can see the devices as they have been detected by the native SATA and IDE drive connections. THE Channel 0 is the Primary master which has two Plextor optical drives attached to it. Even though the physical connections are not available for the Secondary IDE channel on the motherboard, it is still displayed in the BIOS. The IDE Channel 2 and 3 (Master/Slave) devices are the four Serial ATA II channels proivded by the ICH7R Southbridge. On the first three channels, I have installed the Western Digital WD740, the 74GB Raptor Drive.

     The Integrated Peripherals section contains the majority of all drive and USB settings. Notice again that there are Secondary channel PCI IDE settings even though the connection is not available on the motherboard. Right below that we have the mode setting for the ICH7R SATA II connectors. The only drawback to using the RAID mode is that all four connectors become dedicated to the RAID array. So, you can't use two of the channels for a RAID array and use the other two for optical drives or other storage devices. A minor complaint, but worth mentioning. Until we get down to the GigaRAID selections, the settings are pretty familiar; USB and other onboard accessory mode selection. GigaRAID refers to the two IDE connectors and whether you want to use them for RAID or standard IDE ports.

     The PC Health Status is used to display current fan speed and temperature levels as well as set individual warning levels. The CPU Smart Fan mode is set which type of cooling fan you have installed. If you have a 3-pin fan then you set the option to VOTLAGE. If you have installed an Intel standard 4-pin fan, then you use the PWM option.