GIGABYTE Motherboards Now Windows 8 Ready

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GIGABYTE, a leading manufacturer of motherboards and graphics cards, today announced that the entire range of currently available GIGABYTE motherboards is ready for Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system. This readiness includes driver and BIOS support that will ensure the absolute smoothest transition to the new OS.

GIGABYTE Ultra Durable™ motherboards are known for their reliable longevity, as was recently demonstrated in the GIGABYTE Hidden Gems competition where 74% of the submissions featured GIGABYTE motherboards that were 5 years or older, and one outstanding entry used a 21 year old GIGABYTE motherboard that is still operational today! With this caliber of Ultra Durability in mind, GIGABYTE engineers have been working tirelessly to ensure that current motherboards will be able to handle the demands of the next gen OS.
 
Hmmm. Why does the idea of a motherboard working for more than 5 years not impress me much? There really isn't much to go wrong with them.
 
There isn't much now.. but before 5 years ago it was a different story.
 
sixpac said:
There isn't much now.. but before 5 years ago it was a different story.
Click to expand...

Actually, it was for a period of time that they had majir issues with motherboards lasting.

A whole lot of really old boards will work fine.. then once you get to the Socket 7, Slot 1, Slot-A, Socket 370, there were huge Quality issues... This went on for quite a few years. Only in the past few years has it gotten better.

Kinda makes me wish I would have kept some of my really old stuff.. like 386/486 era stuff.
 
Why should the hardware manufacture worry about OS compatibility, isn't that in the hands of the OS itself? What fancy devices are on this Gigabyte board that makes it work differently on Windows? I'm currently using a Gigabyte board with Linux and no were does it say it had to be made compatible, it just works. This reminds me of those monitors with the 'Vista Compatible" stickers, that I keep on my monitor so I can laugh every know and then.

Or is this just Marketing Speak?
 
It basically just means that they have actual Win8 drivers available and that they have supposedly fixed any bugs in the BIOS that only showed up in Win8.. like maybe powersaving features.. stuff like that
 
The latest ASUS BIOS for the P79 boards, and I would image all the rest of thier stuff, is touted as providing the best Win8 compatibility and performance. Ver 2002, I see that they screwed around with UEFI but it works OK.
 
what is different in windows 8 that would require gigabyte to certify their boards are Win 8 ready outside of marketing hype?
 
I don't think only GIgabyte brand would says that they are Window 8 ready, I think other brand will do.
It is natural to inform the public that their board are Window 8 ready as it was done on Window 7.
The fact is that there are changes under bios to support it feature.
Specially the driver of the chipset must indicate it support to insure the public they can use it on Window 8.
 
Audio codec, network card, 3rd party USB 3.0, 3rd party SATA controller etc. has to have a driver for Windows 8.

This is a bit stupid as almost every Win 7 driver will work with Win 8.
The change from XP -> Vista was big and a lot of hardware got left in the ditch both.
 
The 21 year old board wouldn't surprise me though. When I was working at my college we'd treat those old boards with the utmost disrespect and they'd still keep on trucking. They were built like tanks. There really wasn't much to them, not like the NASA center grade stuff they got today.
 
This is probably referring at least in part to their recent UEFI BIOS upgrades for older boards (Z68 based boards for instance all recently had new UEFI BIOSes made available, totally different than the old Award legacy BIOSes that shipped on the boards)
 
Its a freaking marketing press release trying to say (1) they are ahead of their competition and (2) that it matters.

I'm not sure either matters a whole lot or even true.
 
There are advantages and disadvantages on UEFI bios, Linux user prefer no UEFI bios but legacy bios, but modern window prefer UEFI bios.
 
I just updated my Z68X-Ud3-B3 (except for unsupported 3rd party tools no way back..to award bios btw)


Anyways... it (UEFI) is lacking overclocking features (where the heck is LLC and PLL settings? / can't set dynamic vcore now (or at least can't figure out how to get it to work?)


Also tried to set the turbo multipliers to 43 just wouldn't take them w/ my I5-2500K, was able to disable turbo and set the main multiplier to 43


On the upside ...it seems to get through post a bit quicker. however all in all I'm not at all sure I wouldn't have been better off just keeping the F12 award bios I had. I guess I will hope Gigabyte will update the UEFI to include the currently missing features.
 
Asus has had Win 8 drivers for weeks already. It does matter greatly if your running Win8 RP and have tried to install Win 7 drivers from the CD or web site most will say 'uncompatible OS' So unless your running Win 8 and have some experience with drivers, don't say it's a marketing gimmic or it doesn't matter.
 
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