mother board weirdness

I just did a buildworld and everything seems to work fine, but I have
something going with the mb.  I have an epox 8rda and when it boots up
the lcd on the board singnals FF, meaning alls good.  Then the boot
manager comes up, I choose bsd and after the kenerl starts to load( or
just before, its hard to tell because this is a fast booting machince)
the lcd changes to 10.  My manual says it is "Auto detect flash type to
load appropriate flash R/W codes into runtime area F000 for ESCD & DMI
support."  It has never does this before, it has always stayed FF.  Does
these mean sometype type of new feature is now supported in freebsd?  In
win98 it stays FF and I know win98 does not support all of the board
functions because it is an old os and the nvidia drivers did not help to
support all the features ether.
Thanks,
Jason