This week, Art Studios Entertainment announced that it has released a new version of its EFiX module.
The new module improves on the stability of the unit's internal electronics, allowing it to be used in a greater variety of conditions. According to Art Studio's CEO, Davide Rutigliano, the new EFiX 1.1 uses both new material on the body as well as new components on the inside. The new module also contains a new protection scheme implemented to avoid the possibility of corruption from irregular power delivery from bad power supplies, or faulty motherboards.
Recently, several users confirmed that they were experiencing issues using the EFiX module with the Bonjour networking protocol in OS X Leopard. We have confirmed that this isn't in fact an EFiX issue at all, but an issue pertaining to BIOSes on Gigabyte motherboards--which are one of the brands listed on EFiX's compatibility list. When in use with a comparable DFI motherboard however, Bonjour works without problems. However, Rutigliano and team say that a fix is on the way.
Rutigliano indicated that the new EFiX 1.1 will be more widely available for purchase than the previous version, but he added that firmware for 1.1 will be completely backwards compatible with previous EFiX modules.
For those who aren't familiar, the EFiX module is a hardware EFI device, that when installed, interrupts the regular boot process and boots the installed operating system using EFI rather than the aging BIOS standard. Consequently, this allows an EFiX installed system to install and run operating systems like Apple's OS X Leopard. With the right hardware configuration, an EFiX system will run an unmodified retail version of OS X well as well as all software for OS X. System Updates also work properly without illegally modifying OS X or any other EFI-based OS.
Take a look at our past interview with Rutigliano here, for a detailed idea of what makes the EFiX module work.
