Will confess that I relied on talking with the good folks in the IT department at work as well as talking to a couple of hardcore gamers to narrow down my selection. When talking to folks who know the specs of a lot of different components and systems without looking them up I do tend to pay attention. One notable thing to mention is that I am not running with a graphics card. The built in components of the motherboard seem to be good enough for my requirements. Must be the gaming features kicking in.
As to your question about configuration settings that would depend on your BIOS and hardware driver options which is when I start to have conversations with the good folks mentioned above who live and breathe in the realm of hardware and binary code.