Is Twin BIOS tech dead?

[Senex]

Just found out Chaintech is defunct as for making Twin BIOS motherboards. Is anyone else doing Twin BIOS motherboards, or is the Gigabyte Dual BIOS motherboards the only (sorta similar) option now?

 

[Dahak]

I know some high end asus boards use a dual bios too, think on the rampage family and some of the other rog boards

 

[cody_horner]

Has anyone ever had to make use of a dual BIOS? AFAIK, it's a marketing gimmick. All the latest boards will reset on overclock failure - and if you blow a BIOS chip on your board, quite frankly you should RMA the board regardless as there will generally be another issue.

 

[Throckmorton]

Has anyone ever had to make use of a dual BIOS? AFAIK, it's a marketing gimmick. All the latest boards will reset on overclock failure - and if you blow a BIOS chip on your board, quite frankly you should RMA the board regardless as there will generally be another issue.

What if a BIOS update fails?

 

[theevilsharpie]

What if a BIOS update fails?

The mobo will have some sort of BIOS recovery functionality that you can use to restore the BIOS.

 

[Dahak]

The mobo will have some sort of BIOS recovery functionality that you can use to restore the BIOS.

Provided that it fails after flashing that part, I have bricked a gigabyte board that did have that recovery feature but it failed at the start of the flash which erased even that function

 

[Rubycon]

I have a REXIII with dual bios and a switch that lets you toggle between them when the system is off (but powered up by the PSU). It has a yellow LED to indicate which BIOS is active. Comes in handy when using beta BIOS' etc.

I like their ability to flash off a disk attached to the system. Copy the rom file to a usb stick, go into the BIOS and choose to flash, browse to the rom and you're done! No more tricky boot disks or command lines or burning cds/creating boot disks just to boot from to flash!

 

[jacktesterson]

My republic of gaming (rog) board doesn't.


Yet I I recently had a 785g motherboard by gigabyte that did, good thing too as first bios crashed all the time

 

[ChaiBabbaChai]

the BIOS recovery feature is made possible BECAUSE it has dual BIOS'.

 

[HeXen]

The mobo will have some sort of BIOS recovery functionality that you can use to restore the BIOS.

....and it doesnt work. been there, done that on the Gigabit ultra durable boards when the bios goes bad, theres no way to make it restore or use the other bios. its supposed to automatically invoke to restore...but that doesnt happen.
maybe it only works for flash fails but then i would wonder if it will always detect every kind of bad flash cause some bad flashes appear to work as in you can access the bios but you can't do anything else after that.

 

[Senex]

I have a REXIII with dual bios and a switch that lets you toggle between them when the system is off (but powered up by the PSU). It has a yellow LED to indicate which BIOS is active. Comes in handy when using beta BIOS' etc.

I like their ability to flash off a disk attached to the system. Copy the rom file to a usb stick, go into the BIOS and choose to flash, browse to the rom and you're done! No more tricky boot disks or command lines or burning cds/creating boot disks just to boot from to flash!

I'd like to research this motherboard more though...is this the ASUS Rampage III? If not, please advise Brand/model number. And thanks for the lead!

 

[Zap]

....and it doesnt work. been there, done that on the Gigabit ultra durable boards when the bios goes bad, theres no way to make it restore or use the other bios. its supposed to automatically invoke to restore...but that doesnt happen.

Seems a common enough problem. Do a search. Gigabyte boards often will just go into an endless power on loop when it tries (but fails) to recover from the second BIOS.

 

[Rubycon]

I'd like to research this motherboard more though...is this the ASUS Rampage III? If not, please advise Brand/model number. And thanks for the lead!

Rampage III Extreme

Most excellent discussion begins here:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=250635

 

[Synomenon]

Seems a common enough problem. Do a search. Gigabyte boards often will just go into an endless power on loop when it tries (but fails) to recover from the second BIOS.

I've had two Gigabyte boards now and both boards have been able to recover from the second BIOS w/o any problems.

Doesn't say good about Gigabyte though that both boards got into situations where they needed to recover from the second BIOS.

 

[Drsignguy]

All my Gigabyte boards do very well with the recovery by using the backup Bios with the exception of the latest. My somewhat new P67 (that will be returned very soon due to the Sata problem) has issues. Works but when I changed from IDE to AHCI after getting a SSD, it reverted back to F2 Bios from the backup and I had to Flash to the F6 once again. Did this several times when I did some overclocking also. It even did it when everything was set to Default. Said it had an overclocking issue at that time...... right.