Hi All,
We've just had a meeting today to get the latest info for you all. It's quite a complicated situation so please bare with me.
1) Not every motherboard UEFI BIOS is compatible. ASUS will only be qualifying it's own motherboards. Currently these are fully compatible with UEFI Fast Boot Mode:
- Intel 7 Series or later
- Intel X79 Series updated to Win8 BIOS (3xxx)
- Intel H61 Series R2.0 or later
- AMD R2.0 series or later
UEFI is not a uniform standard. There is Gen 1 and Gen 2. Only Gen 2 is compatible with Win8 Fast Boot and has to have the BIOS code re-written from the ground up, which is why even if your board has "UEFI" and is older than on the list it won't work with Win8's Fast Boot sorry. It must have a Win8 certified UEFI BIOS.
All our GPU UEFI BIOS' are dual mode (hybrid). We are currently testing our legacy and 1st Gen UEFI boards to see which are compatible and will fall back to booting from the legacy BIOS code until you update to a Win8/2nd Gen UEFI board. We cannot guarantee other manufacturer boards will fall back correctly, causing no POST or no display output.
GOOD NEWS!:
We have tested our Hybrid BIOS on a range of Intel and AMD motherboards ranging back 4-5 years and the Hybrid fall-back function works perfectly in all cases! That means even if you have older ASUS motherboards with no UEFI even, you can still install the Hybrid UEFI GPU BIOS and it will automatically fall-back to legacy mode!
EDIT: Updated this part 26th Feb
EDIT2: 2nd update 28th Feb.
3) As you may know we don't just make one GTX 680, for example, in fact there are 12 different versions, which all have different BIOS'. As you can imagine, if you flash the wrong BIOS your card will not work. Multiply this by several products and that's many, many BIOS'. The chance of getting it wrong is unacceptably high when as codes vary by small amounts.
However, despite Nvidia's suggestion and the large potential for incompatibility causing no POST, we are still going to introduce UEFI GPU BIOS' under condition of the clear warnings above. Starting first with the GTX 680 in the next few weeks we will be providing a very detailed guide on how to check your GPU version and how to upgrade the VBIOS. The on evaluation of success of that (and any modification of the guide) we will then add GTX 670, 660 Ti. This is exclusive to the high-end GPUs and ROG forums for now.
4) During April we will have a more public release of an automated tool for checking compatibility and updating the VBIOS if it detects all is OK. Should this tool not work for you, yet you are convinced your PC is compatible, you can use the guide we provided.
Hope this helps everyone understand the next month-to-6 weeks better 🙂
