News Sandy Bridge-era motherboard gains M.2 SSD boot support 12 years after launch — first new BIOS in a decade for decommissioned motherboard

[Admin]

A Chinese forum user has discovered that Gigabyte silently added M.2 NVMe SSD boot support to the 13-year-old B75M-D3H motherboard via a firmware update.

Sandy Bridge-era motherboard gains M.2 SSD boot support 12 years after launch — first new BIOS in a decade for decommissioned motherboard : Read more

 

[Kentmos]

It's been around a while. My Sabertooth X79 with i7 3960x, which I still run today, has a modded BIOS with both M.2 boot support an ReBAR enabled.

 

[Flemkopf]

I'm going to say it, can we get more colored motherboards back again? That Blue, White and Black motherboard just pops in a way that modern Black, Grey, and White Highlights just don't anymore. When you look at server motherboards you start getting some of the nice, old-fashioned Green and Blue boards, which I'd love to have again. They just provide a softening that RGB doesn't really create.

 

[artk2219]

I'm going to say it, can we get more colored motherboards back again? That Blue, White and Black motherboard just pops in a way that modern Black, Grey, and White Highlights just don't anymore. When you look at server motherboards you start getting some of the nice, old-fashioned Green and Blue boards, which I'd love to have again. They just provide a softening that RGB doesn't really create.

They did have more fun with color schemes back then, black, blue, green, orange, purple, red, silver, and yellow were all in the mix. Now its pretty much all black, with an occasional white or silver board, then you're right, they just throw some RGB in, its not the same.

Abit AN8 SLI

Asus Crosshair iv

Biostar to790GXE

DFI Lanparty

EVGA X58 SLI

Soyo KT600 Dragon Ultra Platinum

 

[atomicWAR]

It's been around a while. My Sabertooth X79 with i7 3960x, which I still run today, has a modded BIOS with both M.2 boot support an ReBAR enabled.

I came in here with the same mindsest. I hacked together a bios on my old x79 Rampage IV that allowed boot to NVMe. I actually had three PCIe 3.0 nvme drives on board my old system. MAN those x79 boards ran for days. I kept it as my daily driver for work and gaming until I jumped on an AM5 board for Zen 4.

I literally got 12 years out of that system, 5 gpus gens (gtx 680 sli'd through RTX 2080 Ti )...2 CPUs (3930K and Xeon 1680 V2) and ram going from 16GB to 64GB. I never had a system run for so long as my main rig while staying competitive in gaming performance (stareted at 1080P60hz to 4K144hz) and being upgraded so much in it's lifetime. I had Intel to "thank" for that with their disgustingly low performance increases during that era. I hope product stagnation never reaches that level again but I will always have fond memories of my X79 rig all the same.

Anyways it is nice to see old boards get official support so far out in their life cycle.

 

[slash3]

Anyways it is nice to see old boards get official support so far out in their life cycle.

I did the same with my Z77 OC Formula, adding NVMe support (and ReBAR) via BIOS mod. Worked great.

I suspect there was an end user who had asked Gigabyte about support and they just pushed it to the main website while they were at it, as it was easy enough.

 

[Air2004]

https://www.empowerlaptop.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/DSC05486_.webp

This reminds me of my current rig and yes I still use it today (although Harley any more)
I won the cpu from tiger direct and built around it. The cpu is a intel core i7 2600k

 

[RedBear87]

Not relevant to the American users because of the almighty God Emperor Drumpf's tariffs, but on Aliexpress there have been B75 motherboards modded even with M2 slots from quite a while. And on the topic of PCIe 2.0 x4, I actually install my games on a secondary 970 EVO through an adapter on my B450 mobo. It's quite usable for now.

 

[Tbonius]

It's been around a while. My Sabertooth X79 with i7 3960x, which I still run today, has a modded BIOS with both M.2 boot support an ReBAR enabled.

I'm still running an X79 Sabertooth with an M.2 boot drive but the rebar bios mod was a little bit out of my league. Any chance I could get a copy of your bios?

 

[Kentmos]

I'm still running an X79 Sabertooth with an M.2 boot drive but the rebar bios mod was a little bit out of my league. Any chance I could get a copy of your bios?

Sure, here You go:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZumhwEyIBIW9h5TWFyrcVld3Y6eJS-xI/view?usp=sharing

Now remember to backup Your old BIOS! As You probably did with the one You got, copy the file to a memstick and flash it through the flashback button on the back. Don't use the EZ Flash! It won't work!

And please be aware that You are doing this at Your own risk! I will not be held responsible for any failures or data loss!

 

[mo_osk]

Any UEFI bios is natively able to boot from any storage that is adressable. Most motherboard targeted for consumer don't expose that possibility to the user, but it's trivial to modify the bios file to target a device since there are tools designed to edit uefi bios.

I had a Z87X-UD3H-CF with a modded bios to allow me to boot from an nvme drive connected though a pcie adapter.

 

[Tbonius]

Sure, here You go:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZumhwEyIBIW9h5TWFyrcVld3Y6eJS-xI/view?usp=sharing

Now remember to backup Your old BIOS! As You probably did with the one You got, copy the file to a memstick and flash it through the flashback button on the back. Don't use the EZ Flash! It won't work!

And please be aware that You are doing this at Your own risk! I will not be held responsible for any failures or data loss!

Thank you Sir.

 

[Kentmos]

Thank you Sir.

You're very welcome.

 

[yahrightthere]

Hmm wonder if this is also available for Ivy Bridge.
Don't see an update available for Gigabyte MOBO GA-Z77X-UD3H (rev. 1.0) on the site.
I've tried a intel P3600 & P4500 SSD in the PCIe slots, neither would let the system boot, not trying to boot from an installed OS on them, they just halt the system, not sure why, they work well in a newer system.
Have a i5-3570K with a Titan X Pascal (I found for free), it's the 3rd GPU, connected to living room HT which works well enough for my needs.