Advice on upgrading my non-UEFI compatible motherboard.

CyberAly · 9 Jan 2013 at 13:49

Hello.

I purchased a computer from OverClockers in late-2010 and it's been very good since then. I hadn't made any hardware upgrades until last month when I bought a new 3TB hard drive to replace the 500GB one which came with it. I moved my data over to the new hard drive using CloneZilla and it all worked just fine, but then I ran into the 2.2TB partition limit you get with MBR (master boot record) type hard drives. The only option for me would be to reformat the drive as GPT (GUID partition table), but in order for that to work, i'll have to have a motherboard which supports UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), and that's why i'm here.

My current motherboard is a Gigabyte H55M-UD2H. Does this motherboard support UEFI? I'm pretty sure, from my research, that it doesn't, but I just wanted to make sure.

If it indeed doesn't support UEFI, could you recommend a motherboard which does? Is it likely that i'd have to upgrade anything along with the motherboard? What things to I need to keep an eye on with regards to compatibility? How easy would it be to install it incorrectly and mess up my computer?

Thanks in advance for any help!

covenantuk · 9 Jan 2013 at 14:53

I believe your motherboard is for socket 1156 CPUs. There's very few choices for that socket and UEFI - ASRock P67 transformer is one of the few (if you can find one in stock somewhere)

If I were you I'd save up a little more and buy both a CPU and motherboard. Depending on the urgency either get a Socket 1155 and Ivy/Sandy CPU or wait for Haswell release and get that.

A motherboard and CPU change is relatively easy to do as long as you're careful and read the motherboard manual/take advice if you have any doubts. It will require a full OS reinstall but for your HDD you're planning that anyway. I don't know your full system specs, but do make sure your graphics card will fit any new motherboard. You'll be able to use your RAM even though it's lower speed than the current motherboards can handle.

yashiro · 9 Jan 2013 at 15:13

It's cheaper to just live with it until you are ready to do a full rebuild.

CyberAly · 9 Jan 2013 at 15:30

covenantuk said:
I believe your motherboard is for socket 1156 CPUs. There's very few choices for that socket and UEFI - ASRock P67 transformer is one of the few (if you can find one in stock somewhere)

The processor is an Intel i3. I don't know if they come in multiple varieties, but that's what it is. (i'm no hardware expert, clearly)

covenantuk said:
If I were you I'd save up a little more and buy both a CPU and motherboard. Depending on the urgency either get a Socket 1155 and Ivy/Sandy CPU or wait for Haswell release and get that.

A motherboard and CPU change is relatively easy to do as long as you're careful and read the motherboard manual/take advice if you have any doubts. It will require a full OS reinstall but for your HDD you're planning that anyway. I don't know your full system specs, but do make sure your graphics card will fit any new motherboard. You'll be able to use your RAM even though it's lower speed than the current motherboards can handle.

My graphics card is an XFX ATI Radeon HD 5850. I was thinking of upgrading my RAM at some point anyway. I've currently got 4GB and I was thinking maybe 6GB would be more ideal since I use a lot of game development software at once which often causes issues. It could be that my processor just isn't up to the task, it was overclocked (by overclockers before it was shipped to me) to 4.2GHz which is quite high for an i3. I wouldn't be adverse to upgrading the whole shebang, but then it makes me wonder if it would be cheaper to buy a whole new system. I'll take a look around and see what this might end up costing me. If it's too much, i'm happy enough with 2.2TB for the time being.

Just as an additional question, would it be possible to use gParted to make an additional extended partition on the drive? I tried this as one of my early solutions to the issue, the extended partition would create but the logical partition within that would not. I got very little help on the gParted forums... Any ideas?