Cmos!?

[t00lb0x]

what is the CMOS? why clear it? what happens if you clear it?

[amd_man2005]

CMOS is the options you go into when you boot up, that is if you press the DEL key or F10, or whatever it may be for your mobo. If you clear it, you must redo all your settings. You may clear it if you overclock and your pc wont boot, or sometimes you may clear it for new cpu's, there is a bunch of reasons to clear it, those are just two of the main reasons.

[t00lb0x]

LoL, stupid me! anyways my mobo (gigabyte) has dual bios so i just save my last worked setting before overclocking and i can boot from the last working/stable setting so i dont lose any previous o/cing work

[Darthtanion]

Unless things have changed with regards to Gigabyte's dual BIOS chips, the secondary chip is never changed. That's the whole purpose of having the dual BIOS to begin with. If you get infected by a boot level virus or screw up the settings so bad that you cannot fix the settings or enter the primary BIOS, then the secondary one will allow you to boot with the original factory settings to ensure that you have a working system to try to fix things up in the original.

[Dyck15]

Actually, I believe CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor) is the chip where the settings are stored. The program that accesses those settings is the BOIS (Basic Input/Output System) which is stored in a ROM chip on the mobo. I believe it's EEPROM (Electronic Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory).

So your gigabyte board has 2 CMOS chips to store 2 sets of data. Great thing ain't it. I have one of those myself. I just wish more manufactures would use it.

[t00lb0x]

uh some big words, but to Darthtanion, i thought i saw a functin that said "write to secondary bios" so i was just guessing, i've never had to use it

[Darthtanion]

As I said... "Unless things have changed with regards to Gigabyte's dual BIOS chips". It has been about a year since I last played with the Gigabyte boards, so it could be a change they made. I don't think it would be beneficial, but it could be that you can write settings to the secondary BIOS chip.

Dyck15,
I understand the terms you quoted, but I customarily use terms that are acceptable within the enthusiast community. It tends to make conversations more easily understandable. My most humble apologies if I offended your technical knowledge.