Gigabyte uEFI Support

[jpmucha]

Hello all,

I'm looking at some of the upcoming P67 and H67 motherboards. Asus has been advertising uEFI BIOS for their Sandy Bridge motherboards. One of the 'telltale' features for uEFI seems to be the ability to boot from a 3TB partition. The one Gigabyte H67 board I've been focusing on does have a beta BIOS with '3TB drive boot'. Does anyone know if this implies a uEFI BIOS? All the released BIOS files for this board are 1MB, but the beta bios is 1.4MB. The Asus uEFI BIOS was approaching 3MB is that's any indication.

These boards seem to have pretty large BIOS ROMs so there might be headroom for uEFI in the future...
I'm trying to design a system with some amount of future proofing... so this would be a nice feature.

Thanks in advance

 

[Fatbird]

The latest BIOS release will support 3TB HDD booting. You will need to use the latest @BIOS from Gigabyte website for updating the original BIOS to EFI-enabled BIOS.

 

[jpmucha]

The latest BIOS release will support 3TB HDD booting. You will need to use the latest @BIOS from Gigabyte website for updating the original BIOS to EFI-enabled BIOS.

The Gigabyte site said the board had a 'dual' 32Mbit (4MB) Flash ROMs, so it felt like the hardware had some flexibility designed into it. I suspected the beta BIOS was EFI I wrote to Gigabyte tech support a week ago, but no response.
My next curiousity is whether the implementation is EFI on top of BIOS, or purely EFI
As of tonight, the EFI BIOS is still beta, but thank you very much for the tip about @BIOS when switching to EFI.

 

[jpmucha]

Best answer selected by jpmucha.

 

[Fatbird]

Just found that Gigabyte has posted many released version for supporting 3TB.
e.g. http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3646#bios

As I know that there is a BIOS option to select whether using the EFI or not.
Guess that a partial of EFI is implemented but not a whole EFI structure change.

 

[jpmucha]

Ahh... good find. They were bound go 'go live' with that. That does sound like a "EFI on BIOS" layered solution. It sound like until now, Gigabyte was the only manufacturer with non-uEFI 6-series chipset motherboards.

I realized that the one H67 board I was looking at didn't have enough SATA ports for my drive array... so uEFI wasn't the deciding factor after all.