Gigabyte Plans to Join the UEFI Party With a Twist on Upcoming X79 Boards

Posted 11/06/2011 at 10:58am | by Justin Kerr

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Gigabyte lead the initial charge with early support for boot drivers bigger than 2.2TB, but while others worked on fixing this with UEFI implementations, they instead kept plugging away on the bios. The company claimed to be using a “HybridEFI”, but let’s be clear here. HybridEFI is a marketing term; it actually has nothing to do with EFI as we know it. When asked about the obvious oversight, Gigabyte claimed they wanted to do it right, and we finally have a chance to see what they have in mind. 

The company has released a short 3 minute video showing off its new glasses free 3D Bios, demonstrated on a board equipped 3D power. This description suggests the marketing folks over at Gigabyte are still alive and well, just in case you were worried. Silly made up buzzwords aside, the concepts shown are somewhat interesting, and we certainly can’t fault them for not being original. Users for example can hover over components on the board to learn more about them, and even left click to access specific configuration settings for the highlighted component. To expand on this a bit, clicking on the SATA ports would allow you to configure a RAID setup, while clicking on the CPU brings up overclocking options. 

The UEFI shown will debut on its upcoming X79 boards using Intel’s Patsburg chipset, and is expected to release within the next few months. Gigabyte will also to offer a “non-3D” version of the UEFI it is calling “advanced mode”, which it claims will be more suitable for power users. From the looks of it most power users could probably make do with the 3D interface alone, but we have always been big fans of choice.

Gigabyte may be late to the party, but based on the video, it’s an impressive first showing.