Dual BIOS Necessary?

Posted 08/31/2010 at 11:00am | by The Maximum PC Staff

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I am looking at a new build with an AMD CPU. I normally use Asus, but I see that Gigabyte puts out a board with a dual BIOS. What are the advantages and disadvantages of a dual-BIOS board?

—Rich

Gigabyte’s secondary BIOS is redundancy for the motherboard’s main BIOS. If you suffer a corrupt BIOS from a bad flash, the board reverts to the backup BIOS to boot the system. It’s a nice feature for folks who believe in redundancy, but the Doc doesn’t think it’s a make-or-break feature unless you hack on your BIOS so much that you need the fallback. The Doc has flashed hundreds of motherboard BIOSes over the years and has suffered only one catastrophic failure. These days, updating the BIOS is pretty easy and no longer gives you the same pucker-up fear that you got in 1997 or 2000, when Gigabyte first introduced its dual-BIOS feature. It was certainly scarier back in those days. Again, unless you’ve been burned by a corrupt BIOS in the past, there are probably other more important features that should inform your purchasing decision, such as performance, slot configuration, accessories, and price.

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