I know some higher end gaming motherboards that were targeted towards the overclocking community had two bios chips for exactly this purpose and switching between them was trivial from what I remember. If you overclocked too far, you wouldn't brick your system. It seemed like overkill to me. I'm guessing this is less common than it's worth to fix in software, but then at least continue to give support for the issue.

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drdexebtjl 6 hours ago | parent [-]

If you overclocked too far, you could remove the CMOS battery or hold the CLR_CMOS button that these high-end boards probably had.

Two BIOS chips was supposed to protect you from bad BIOS updates or a bad BIOS mod, just like the scenario from TFA.

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quantum5 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Original author here, and I agree. When overclocking, the most important feature is probably resetting the CMOS with one easy to reach button.

I was testing ECC previously in https://qt.ax/ecc and was trying to overclock the RAM to induce faults to confirm ECC was fixing them. Since I was using a cheaper board, I had to use keys to short the CLR_CMOS header and that got old really quick... I didn't ultimately succeed in creating a barely stable overclock that generated a ton of ECC errors, but that was a very awful experience.

Having some sort of BIOS recovery is definitely the baseline I'd expect these days, and having two BIOS chips so you can just keep using the device as if nothing had happened is the best solution.

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jorvi 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Possible they're thinking of certain OC editions of GPUs. Some of them have 2 BIOSes you can switch between with a little slider. Some even 3.

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drdexebtjl 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Isn’t that just a gimmick?

I was under the impression that GPU overclocking, overvoltage and fan curve settings were not persistent across reboots.

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quantum5 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It's not a gimmick when the serious overclocking people do custom VBIOSes. Similarly for miners. That's when you need the recovery switch if things go wrong.

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drdexebtjl 4 hours ago | parent [-]

TIL about custom VBIOSes.

Why don’t the OEMs of GPUs aimed at OCing just ship with a BIOS that exposes more tweaks through software though…

	▲	Benanov 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Custom Video Card firmware has been around a long time. It was possible to convert PC video cards to Mac use by flashing them. When I was faffing around with PPC64 Macs (I mean hey I got it for free) I picked up an ATI card on ebay that had been flashed. I had sleep issues. It was the lowest-end G5. I ended up recycling it.