[SOLVED] Is legacy bios worse than UEFI?

[alphacoyle]

I just got old office pc, installed WIN10 but see it's in legacy bios and am wondering if it would affect perfomance to be UEFI?

 

[Colif]

In 2006 or so Intel decided the bios as it was at time was too limited and needed to be replaced so that it supported newer technologies as they were invented

By about 2009 a consortium of hardware makers had combined to create UEFI standard


Old bios were limited, they didn't know what a mouse was for, so everything was keyboard driven
they weren't expandable, everything had to fit in a small amount of memory
they only supported Master Boot Record (MBR) which can only have 4 partitions per drive (there are tricks to get around this) and max drive size is 2.2 tb

UEFI bios overcame all the limitations of legacy bios (as it came to be called)
it supports mouse, it has a GUI so it looks better than previous bios could
Its expandable, it can be added to to grow as new hardware is created.
UEFI supports MBR & GPT Drives

whether you would get better performance is an interesting question, you may not notice one at all.

UEFI is both the bios and also a boot method. If your bios shows a legacy boot mode option in the bios, it is already a UEFI bios.

 

[alphacoyle]

In 2006 or so Intel decided the bios as it was at time was too limited and needed to be replaced so that it supported newer technologies as they were invented

By about 2009 a consortium of hardware makers had combined to create UEFI standard


Old bios were limited, they didn't know what a mouse was for, so everything was keyboard driven
they weren't expandable, everything had to fit in a small amount of memory
they only supported Master Boot Record (MBR) which can only have 4 partitions per drive (there are tricks to get around this) and max drive size is 2.2 tb

UEFI bios overcame all the limitations of legacy bios (as it came to be called)
it supports mouse, it has a GUI so it looks better than previous bios could
Its expandable, it can be added to to grow as new hardware is created.
UEFI supports MBR & GPT Drives

whether you would get better performance is an interesting question, you may not notice one at all.

UEFI is both the bios and also a boot method. If your bios shows a legacy boot mode option in the bios, it is already a UEFI bios.

There's 2 boot options to select, legacy or UEFI, but when I select UEFI it says there's no file system found. LIke this:

This is just reference pic from web, when I select UEFI and click add boot option is when get the no file system found, and clicking view does nothing (my UEFI button isn't red like in pic.)

 

[Colif]

Its possible the bios is looking for GPT drives. Your boot drive is formatted as Master Boot Record (MBR)
Legacy boot method only supports Master Boot Record drives, whereas UEFI should support both GPT and MBR but its possible yours is looking for GPT

GPT = GUID Partition Table
GUID = Global Unique ID = Every GPT drive on earth has a unique ID
GPT drives can have a max of 255 partitions on them
Max size of a GPT drive/partition is 18.8 million TB

How many drives in PC? How big are they?
One of the advantages GPT drives have over MBR is size, MBR drives max size is 2tb, GPT is so big we don't need to think about.
But if you have a small drive, its not really going to make a big difference.
Drive size is only a restriction on Legacy when it comes to the boot drive, the bios can access storage drives that are formatted as GPT

You can convert an MBR drive to GPT but its not really worth it on an old PC.

 

[alphacoyle]

Is only 500gb drive. I did a clean install but didn't think about bios/uefi. I've got it setup now, but could reinstall to UEFI, is sitting right here so not a big deal, but if there's no benefit at all besides drive size I will leave as is.

 

[geofelt]

I do not think legacy/uefi makes any sort of difference in performance.

If it makes a difference, modern discrete graphics cards will usually need a UEFI bios to be detected.

 

[Colif]

I am not sure if they need to boot as UEFI to work or just need a UEFI bios.

I would think about UEFI on next install, its not a big problem right now if windows is working already.