To this day computers remain tricky to navigate and understand. Humans have been trying to understand them for decades, but we still haven’t been able to piece together all their intricacies. Due to that we still have numerous questions about how our systems work. Hence, there’s no shame in asking that How Do I Know If My Motherboard Supports UEFI?. In fact, that’s where we come in!
How Do I Know If My Motherboard Supports UEFI?
In this article we’ll be explaining a few methods by which you can distinguish if your motherboard is currently using UEFI or legacy BIOS and if your machine is able to support UEFI.
One thing to note though is that if you’re using a motherboard that has been released recently in the past one or two years then chances are that it supports UEFI.
Still, we need concrete proof and thus we’ve come up with a few methods you can use to check the details of your motherboard.
What is UEFI Boot?
Before we get to the methods through which you can check if your motherboard supports UEFI, you first need to know exactly what UEFI is.
UEFI is an advanced form of firmware designed to replace the more outdated firmware BIOS.
UEFI actually stands for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface and just like the BIOS, it stores the kernel of your Windows OS needed to launch the OS, boot and runtime service calls and platform-related data tables.
How is UEFI Superior to BIOS?
Many of you might be wondering how exactly UEFI is different from your usual BIOS or more importantly how is it better? Well, here are a few ways in which UEFI is superior to BIOS:
- Booting Speed is relatively greater.
- Consumes less power to boot up.
- Enhanced Security.
- Has backwards compatibility with older BIOS systems.
- With UEFI, drive partition size can be up to 2 TB.
- It allows more than four partitions as well.
- More compatible with newer CPUs.
How Do I Know If My Motherboard Supports UEFI?
1. Check Through System Information
Let us start with the least complicated method of all, which is just going into the system information of your PC and checking if your motherboard is running UEFI.
Firstly, go into the start bar and type in “system information” and the system information file will appear in front of you.
Next click on the file and view all the different tabs of the file. Finally, find the “BIOS mode” tab and click it.
If on the inside it says “UEFI” then congratulations your motherboard is running UEFI.
However, an important thing you should know is that even if it’s not running UEFI that doesn’t mean your motherboard does not support UEFI.
This method only checks what firmware is currently running on your PC. Hence why, we’ve come up with subsequent methods to check what firmware your motherboard supports.
2. Searching Through Your C Drive
This second method is a little more complicated to check if your motherboard is running UEFI. To start with, you need to right-click your start bar and click on file explorer.
Go into the C drive and into the Windows folder. Once inside there will be another file named panther which you have to go into.
Next, you have to find a file named “setupact.log”. Once clicked this file will be opened as a notebook file. After that, select the find box and type in “detected boot environment”.
This will tell you if your motherboard is running UEFI or BIOS.
3. Changing Your Firmware in the BIOS Settings
Once you know that your motherboard does support UEFI you can change from the usual legacy BIOS to UEFI in the BIOS settings.
However, you have to be really careful and backup your system before you even attempt this. We highly advise following a comprehensive guide while doing this so that you are aware of all the risks and take every step correctly and cautiously.
This process can be started from the boot menu when your PC first loads. In the boot menu you can access the BIOS setup utility by continuously pressing F2 while the system is booting.
After the BIOS menu screen is opened select boot. Finally, select the UEFI/BIOS boot mode and press enter.
From here you can select either UEFI or BIOS by using the up and down arrow keys and pressing enter.
Then you just press F10 to save changes and reboot the PC and voila your motherboard is now running UEFI.
4. Check Through Command Prompt
Last but not least, you could always use the command prompt to check if your motherboard is running UEFI.
But for non-technical people, this might be a little complicated so make sure to follow along attentively.
First of all, you need to type cmd in the start bar. That will make the command prompt appear, you then must right-click it and run it as administrator.
Next, you just have to type “bcdedit”. This will make the windows boot loader appear. Once this occurs, find the “path” line, and locate the “winload” file and check its extension name.
If it’s named “.exe” you’re running legacy BIOS on your motherboard and if it’s “.efi” then you’re running UEFI.
Conclusion
UEFI firmware is a much-needed upgrade from the outdated legacy BIOS as it is more compatible with newer processors and has a faster rate of data transmission.
So, it’s only natural for a user to want to run UEFI on their motherboard and hopefully with the help of this guide you can now check which firmware your motherboard is running on.
Lastly, we hope our explanations of every different method were clear and precise enough for you to follow.
And we want to emphasize again how important it is to backup your PC before you go changing your BIOS settings to switch to UEFI because otherwise you will lose all your data.
