Monday, January 7th 2013
Gigabyte Introduces UEFI-Equipped 990FXA-UD5 Motherboard
When Gigabyte ported a bulk of its socket AM3+ motherboard lineup to the modern UEFI BIOS, back in October 2012, top models that support NVIDIA SLI, such as the 990FXA-UD5 missed out, with the 990FXA-UD3 leading the pack. The company made amends launching the 990FXA-UD5 Rev 3.0, which tosses out decades-old legacy BIOS for modern AMI Aptio UEFI BIOS, backed by the company's Dual-UEFI innovation, which protects against failed BIOS updates. The 990FXA-UD5 features a 12-phase VRM to power the CPU, five PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots, supporting 3-way NVIDIA SLI and AMD CrossFireX, eight SATA 6 Gb/s ports, two eSATA 6 Gb/s ports, four USB 3.0, 8-channel HD audio, and a single gigabit Ethernet interface. It is expected to be priced around US $160.
4 Comments on Gigabyte Introduces UEFI-Equipped 990FXA-UD5 Motherboard
I can't even install windows as MBR with it enabled. The drive will automatically be GPT.
Manually FDISKing doesn't work (at least not always), it freezes on formatting the partition.
On top of it, some OEMs are making it splendidly difficult to run in legacy mode. HP has a secret key (F9) on their laptops that you have to use, otherwise, it boots in EFI, regardless. The legacy option in bios does nothing (and it even says it won't use it WTF).
I don't need their driver crap, either. They can shove all of it. Oh, I almost forgot, some of them boot so fast that you can barely get into setup.
I guess it was too hard to just update the old bios to support larger drives. Wankers.
And yes, it would be too difficult to update a nearly 30 year old piece of software to work with modern hardware and software requirements. In no way shape or form is BIOS better than UEFI. It boots slower, it's easier to corrupt, it's more janky to update and it doesn't properly utilize modern, multi-core hardware or fast-boot technologies.