If you're talking about my eMachines when you say, "You get to tweak the settings provided. [...] That is not to say that they may not have been a bit zealous on the locking down", "zealous" does not begin to describe it. You simply couldn't overclock it, period. Even the most advanced overclockers were forced to admit it. The machine was reliable enough (I ran it for 11 years, another person for two years before me; it would still run now if soldering bad capacitors was my thing, and it was a gift so I didn't get to choose how modifiable it was) if rather low-end, and it shipped underclocked for what it was actually capable of.
Expecting a manufacturer who are in the market of producing reasonably priced consumer units to allow everything to be tweaked is rather naive.
So only those who sink big money into more user-modifiable rigs or build-your-own Frankensteins should get to tinker more fully with them? This seems to fly counter to logic, as it seems you'd want the ability to destroy cheap crap to know how to do it right by the time you're working on better machines.
It seems to me if you're knowledgeable enough to mess with the clearly obscure settings discussed within the parameters of this post then it's on you if things go wrong, and that anyone knowledgeable enough to mess with such settings should accept that responsibility to begin with. I don't like all this "holding back what you can do for your own good" stuff, sorry.
If manufacturers were so worried about people bricking computers and the odd lawsuit or two (thousand) then why don't they print manuals and instructions and hold "hacking your own BIOS" classes on the regular and charge for them, too, after they make people sign away their rights forever, a la Windows 10 Insider Preview software? No one but the most devoted hackers would sign up, they could run the classes marathon style and everyone involved just might have a blast.
If they can't or won't take such steps to help the hands-on set then something's wrong because it's not like they're guarding state secrets inside those motherboards and CPUs (well, Intel might be, with their nifty little assortment of NSA-friendly backdoored silicon, but that's another story).
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So only those who sink big money into more user-modifiable rigs or build-your-own Frankensteins should get to tinker more fully with them? This seems to fly counter to logic, as it seems you'd want the ability to destroy cheap crap to know how to do it right by the time you're working on better machines.
It seems to me if you're knowledgeable enough to mess with the clearly obscure settings discussed within the parameters of this post then it's on you if things go wrong, and that anyone knowledgeable enough to mess with such settings should accept that responsibility to begin with. I don't like all this "holding back what you can do for your own good" stuff, sorry.
If manufacturers were so worried about people bricking computers and the odd lawsuit or two (thousand) then why don't they print manuals and instructions and hold "hacking your own BIOS" classes on the regular and charge for them, too, after they make people sign away their rights forever, a la Windows 10 Insider Preview software? No one but the most devoted hackers would sign up, they could run the classes marathon style and everyone involved just might have a blast.
If they can't or won't take such steps to help the hands-on set then something's wrong because it's not like they're guarding state secrets inside those motherboards and CPUs (well, Intel might be, with their nifty little assortment of NSA-friendly backdoored silicon, but that's another story).