Gigabyte BIOS

Jordan97 · 24 Jul 2011 at 13:39

Have they got a graphical UI yet? It says in the description it has a Touch BIOS, but I thought that GB still used the same old keyboard operated BIOS?

Wepohn · 24 Jul 2011 at 15:52

I think the "Touch Bios" is some software you install. Not completely sure though.

nightmare99 · 24 Jul 2011 at 19:03

The reason for Touch BIOS is a bit of a nonsense, it is a windows tool that allows you to adjust BIOS settings from within windows. GB released this to try and deflect from thier decision not to move to a UEFI BIOS yet.

HiVizMan · 25 Jul 2011 at 09:25

Have a read of the touchbios guide I posted. It is a breeze to use.

Just to correct one thing said above. The Gigabyte boards use a hybrid-UEFI bios. That is a combination of the best of the old and the best of the new.

nightmare99 · 25 Jul 2011 at 12:04

The Gigabyte boards use a hybrid-UEFI bios. That is a combination of the best of the old and the best of the new.

Hybrid-UEFI or whatever gigabyte are calling it (it is still a legacy award bios) is basically a bodge to get 3TB boot drive support on the old award bios platform.

Frozen_Texas · 29 Jul 2011 at 15:16

nightmare99 said:
Hybrid-UEFI or whatever gigabyte are calling it (it is still a legacy award bios) is basically a bodge to get 3TB boot drive support on the old award bios platform.

what other things would you expect from UEFI? easy games under bios??? 3TB support is useful and for the bios menus i still prefer keyboard over mouse tbh. and i am still faster on k/b even doing some shortcuts in windows

probably sooner or later they will show (finally!

) GUI bios but it's not key decision indicator for my next purchase. just a thought

nightmare99 · 31 Jul 2011 at 09:12

what other things would you expect from UEFI? easy games under bios??? 3TB support is useful

I do not expect anything from UEFI but would like Gigabyte to actual implement it

(don't really care about the GUI I quite like the APTIO UEFI bios without the gui skin)

Yes 3TB is useful and supported properly under UEFI.

Arthur17 · 31 Jul 2011 at 16:18

Gigabyte's lack of a proper UEFI BIOS is one of the reasons I buy Asus motherboards. Why reward lazy manufacturers?

TechReport has a good article on Gigabyte's TouchBIOS...

First things first: this is not an EFI BIOS (although, technically, EFI is more of a replacement for the BIOS than a specific kind of BIOS). Gigabyte's 6-series motherboards still use an old-school Award BIOS. However, they incorporate an EFI bootloader to enable support for hard drives larger than 2.2TB. You'll need a Gigabyte software utility to use the full capacity of those drives on older operating systems, but the app isn't required for Windows 7 x64, which is the OS we expect most folks to be running with 6-series motherboards.

Native support for 3TB hard drives is one of EFI's most important features, and this bootloader approach appears to deliver the goods without replacing the entire BIOS. Credit Gigabyte for coming up with a novel solution. However, the bootloader doesn't address the larger problem of Gigabyte's current BIOS interface being clunky and downright slow to load some screens.

Then there's the matter of the BIOS's fan speed controls, which are quite a bit more limited than what you get from Asus and MSI.

also...

I've said a lot of very nice things about the UEFI BIOS replacement that Asus seems to have implemented on every new motherboard introduced this year. While that praise is well deserved, I kind of expected the competition to have caught up by now. Not to give anything away, but they haven't. Asus' UEFI remains the cream of the crop, not just because it has the slickest graphical user interface, but also because it offers some of the most useful overclocking, tweaking, and fan control options around. (Source)