How to unlock your BIOS essentially has nothing to do with getting around a password lock,
it has to do with gaining access to a much more in-depth level of control over the basic functioning of your machine.
To system builders, IT professionals, and high-performance users a locked BIOS can be the equivalent of running into a brick wall
(in regard to efficiency, scalability, and security settings). A BIOS that is unlocked provides vast customization avenues that can provide a stunning boost to system performance, increase compatibility and create greater flexibility in operation. So, what are the best answers to why BIOS unlocking is actual and worthy in the modern tech environment?
Accelerate Performance & Power Control
The possibility to adjust performance and power settings is one of the most argumentative reasons to unlock your BIOS. CPU power states (P-states and C-states), turbo boost thresholds, and thermal envelopes can also be controlled in detail with advanced BIOS menus – options which are often limited in OEM firmware.
P-states regulate the performance rates of a processor by means of dynamic frequency and voltage regulation. C-states control the idle power consumption, and allow to adjust between power savings and responsiveness. Exposure to such controls allows a user to adjust the CPU manually to an optimal state or a power-saving state according to their workload.
Unlocking also provides access to fan speed profiles, and thermal management options, which provide users the ability to maximize system cooling. This degree of BIOS performance tuning is essential to thermally stable operation under load indefinitely in the case of data scientists, engineers, and other creatives who use resource-intensive applications.
Enterprise administrators can optimize battery life of devices deployed in the field by reducing power thresholds, or increase processing power to handle computation-intensive processes. Be it a developer testing virtual machines or a gamer stressing hardware to its extreme, access to all the power management BIOS options can result in a measurable increase in performance and life span.
Activate enhanced Storage & Boot Options
New hardware may have high-performance storage protocols such as AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) and NVMe
(Non-Volatile Memory Express), but may have these features disabled in the BIOS by default. Because SSDs are unlocked by enabling
AHCI or NVMe modes in the BIOS, this procedure is critical to realizing the full speed and low-latency potential of SSDs.
Also RAID arrays can be configured by advanced users directly in the BIOS, mixing drives to
provide redundancy or performance. If the BIOS is not unlocked, then RAID configuration might not be possible at all, or only in legacy modes.
In addition, BIOS unlocking reveals the opportunity to change boot sequences, which is important in case of dual-boot systems,
booting externally connected drives, or launching a custom recovery environment. These workflows can
be crippled in the case that your system is locked to boot only off internal storage.
An open BIOS is of immense benefit to professionals who depend on multiboot environments to test,
develop or perform forensic analysis. This capability to boot using USB, PXE network devices or
other partitions presents a new flexibility in system deployment and recovery. All these
features are necessities to IT administrators with mixed device fleets.
The ability to unlock these options can turn BIOS, otherwise a statical interface,
into a highly dynamic hardware flexibility and productivity tool. AHCI mode and RAID BIOS settings plus extended boot options allow your system to stop being held back by the bubbled restrictions set by the factory.
