On an MBR (Master Boot Record) disk, the locations where the partition sizes are stored are only 4 bytes long. Since this is in hexadecimal, the largest value we can stuff in there is all F’s. So the max value would 4,294,967,295 in decimal.
FF FF FF FFh = 4294967295d
This maximum partition size is not in bytes, it is in number of sectors. Since currently sectors are limited to 512 bytes, the maximum size ends up being 2 TB.
4,294,967,295 sectors * 512 bytes/sectors = 2,199,023,255,040 bytes or 2TB.
Source: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askcore/2010/02/18/understanding-the-2-tb-limit-in-windows-storage/
What this means is you can either partition your drive as two partitions, 2TB and 1TB (or 1.5TB and 1.5TB, whatever adds up to 3TB).
GPT support isn't a BIOS issue, it's an OS issue. If you have Windows 7 or newer you have GPT support. The trouble is Windows can't boot from a GPT partition unless you have an EFI firmware, so you are indeed unable to boot Windows as-is from a 3TB partition.
You do have a few options beyond partitioning it into two drives, though it doesn't mean you'll ever have just one partition/drive letter until you upgrade your motherboard to one with UEFI. Personally I would suggest getting a 240GB SSD, putting Windows on that, and using the 3TB drive as a single 3TB GPT partition which you would give the name D:. Clearly this still leaves you with two partitions, but without UEFI you simply can't avoid that. Otherwise you can just use the two partitions. I took the SSD approach since I also lack UEFI, but the big RAID array I have does let me have a 4.77TB partition (according to disk properties, it's 5.25 trillion bytes which would be marketed as 5.25TB and reported as 5.25TB in Linux/OS X).