Most modern motherboards are jumperless, or at least most of the commonly used features can be set through the BIOS. However that usually still leaves a whole slew of jumpers on the motherboard, some of which might even be undocumented. This opens up a whole new perspective, as we are now faced with the possibility of finding an undocumented setting that might propel the motherboard to unforeseen heights as well as acquiring fame across the world as the first person to actually document this undocumented setting. The most effective way of finding these settings is to have a couple of spare jumper caps handy, then subsequently placing ‘m randomly across the motherboard and watch for changes when the system boots up.



Fig 7. Placing jumper caps in random locations, the desired result is to burn traces off the motherboard.
A piece of paper and a pen for taking notes is not recommended, as the repetitive placing of the jumper caps on the wrong location might damage the motherboard beyond recovery. Thus in the light of this exercise, the sooner such damage occurs the better. Placing jumper caps over fan connectors, WOL, SB-Link or other connectors is a great way to render these unusable, as well as do considerable damage to the motherboard. For example, placing a jumper cap over two pins connected to +12 volts and Ground, might effectively ‘burn’ the traces leading up to this jumper off of the motherboard, resulting in unrecoverable damage to the motherboard.