Is UEFI really all that? Boot time that much better?

[biggles]

Recently I considered but decided against upgrading my core i7 920 system to Haswell. The performance increase is not justified IMO.

One of the biggest advantages I read about was how UEFI was replacing the 25 year old BIOS. This was supposedly going to streamline the boot process, thereby massively reducing the time to boot the system.

Anyway, the stuff I read about fast boots was all over the place. Some folks said the boot time was only slightly faster vs old BIOS. Others said boot times were super fast.

So, what is the true story? Does UEFI really improve boot times in a massive way? Or are there other significant benefits to UEFI over BIOS?

 

[Ryleh]

Outside of looking better, booting more quickly, and having a few extra features there isn't much more to it that I'm aware of. Boot times with an SSD on UEFI vs Bios is of little significance. What's an extra (figurative) 15 seconds for something you rarely do?

The benefits for laptops however is very significant to me and well worth it.

 

[Suprfire]

If you turn your PC on and off often and are present to see the actual POST most of the time, there is a noticeable difference (it's significant when were talking seconds here).

The bigger difference is if you switch to an SSD (assuming you don't already have one). However, now were talking about the load times of Windows and not the POSTing. On this subject, the newer UEFI systems have "Windows 8 Fast Boot" as an option, when paired with the semi-hibernate-like shutdown that Windows 8 has, the bootup alltogether is really fast.

 

[DraginDime]

When I moved to UEFI, I really didn't notice any difference in boot times. It may be a tad faster, but nothing earth shattering that caught my attention. It is very nice to have a mouse and the updated GUI was very nice step up from the old BIOS.
I had two WD black 1TB HDDs in Raid 0 for my OS then. Changing my OS to an SSD did make a huge difference in boot times. But that's expected.

One advantage (that I think is related to UEFI, could just be a program feature), is updating the board bios is much easier. On my Asus P67-Deluxe, I was able to update my board bios from the desktop using the AI Suite II. Not sure if other manufactors have this feature, but I found it to be a very nice feature on the rare occasions I have needed to update my board.

 

[blazend]

Honestly the only reason i would use UEFI is for 3tb or larger drives i want the O/S on. For me i had to trick the system for my server installs to allow the boot on a chunk then gpt the rest of the drive.

But for desktops i am using SSD for the O/S i really dont need the UEFI drive. Cause i have 2 separate drives. 1 for boot and 1 for storage.

Updating the BIOS is so easy either way i wouldn't make that a priority to buy the UEFI.

 

[Jeremy C]

If you turn your PC on and off often and are present to see the actual POST most of the time, there is a noticeable difference (it's significant when were talking seconds here).

The bigger difference is if you switch to an SSD (assuming you don't already have one). However, now were talking about the load times of Windows and not the POSTing. On this subject, the newer UEFI systems have "Windows 8 Fast Boot" as an option, when paired with the semi-hibernate-like shutdown that Windows 8 has, the bootup alltogether is really fast.

Good summary. To really see the benefit, you need UEFI+SSD+Win8 fast post. A cold boot will be at the login screen before my monitor fully turns on (about 5 seconds or so). Leaving it on the normal boot takes maybe 12 seconds or so but more importantly allows me enough time to actually get back into the UEFI if I need to. I had read an article that said the window for hitting delete to enter setup was like .25 seconds with fast post enabled, and I was having no luck with the reboot to bios option in W8.

 

[bigdogchris]

On my Windows 7 box, I switched to EUFI boot just for GPT disk. I already had a board with EUFI, though, but I definitely would not buy a new computer just for EUFI. It can actually cause some confusion when changing between BIOS/EUFI boot mode (especially on OEM hardware).