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 5 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 4 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 4 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.

	▲	drdexebtjl 3 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…