Does My Motherboard Support UEFI?

All of the new Intel and AMD motherboards come with support for UEFI. If your model is more than 3 years old it might still support UEFI too. The best way to check is to head to your motherboard manufacturer’s website and search for your model. If the page/PDF documents mention UEFI support then you can boot your computer in UEFI mode.

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How to Check What Type of Motherboard You Have?

Don’t know what motherboard you’re using so you can’t look up its page on the manufacturer’s website? You can easily just check by typing in a simple command into the command prompt.

Don’t worry if you’ve never done it before, just follow these simple steps.

Open the command prompt by typing cmd into your search bar on the Windows taskbar. After it opens, type wmic baseboard get product,manufacturer (without the quote marks) and press enter.

The command prompt will show you the name of the manufacturer and model which you can then Google. Or simply head to the manufacturer’s website and search directly for the model there.

How to Check if Your Motherboard Supports UEFI Using Windows?

There are a couple of different ways to check whether your motherboard supports booting in UEFI mode. While simply checking the motherboard manufacturer’s website is the easiest method, you can also check on your computer.

For the first method, click on your search bar on your Windows taskbar and either select System Information from the menu or search for it.

Once there, just look for BIOS mode in the list and your system will list either UEFI or Legacy next to it. Legacy is now the term for the old BIOS. Even if it lists either BIOS or Legacy, your motherboard might still be able to support UEFI.

The alternative method is to use the command prompt. Type cmd into your search bar on the Windows taskbar and open the program. Then type “bcdedit” without the quote marks and hit enter.

The results will display a Windows Boot Loader list. Look for the word “path” in the list and next to it you’ll see a path extension that looks something like /Windows/System32/winload.

At the end of that, there will either be a .exe for BIOS/Legacy or .efi for UEFI. That will tell you which Bios mode your PC is currently using. Again, even if it displays .exe, it doesn’t mean your motherboard can’t support UEFI.

How to Check if Your Motherboard Supports UEFI Using Linux?

If you’re using a Debian or Ubuntu-based distribution, you can install the efibootmgr package to check if your PC is using UEFI.

I feel that’s a lot of extra work though, considering you can just check your files. Simply look for a folder named /sys/firmware/efi. If it isn’t there, your motherboard doesn’t support UEFI. It’s as simple as that!

How Do You Get UEFI BIOS Mode?

So just for clarity’s sake, when you’re asking how to boot UEFI in BIOS mode, you’re actually referring to the same thing. UEFI and BIOS software is the same thing, except UEFI is a newer version with better capabilities. Both are used to boot the computer before the operating system starts up.

Since BIOS is so outdated, most computers these days don’t run BIOS anymore. We still like to refer to UEFI as BIOS, though, to avoid confusion. It’s basically one of those times when the brand name of something is so well-known it becomes the generic term for that thing. So these days, when you hear someone say BIOS they’re actually referring to UEFI.

In the past, you could quickly access the BIOS on Windows PCs by hitting a specific key (normally F1, F2, F10, Delete, or something like that). Nowadays, computers boot up way too fast for this process to happen so it’s not even an option anymore.

The easiest way to access the UEFI (BIOS) screen on a Windows 10 PC is via your settings menu. After opening the menu, head to the Update & Security tab and select Recovery in the left-hand menu. Select Restart now under Advanced startup.

After your PC has restarted, you’ll see a new startup screen with menu options. Select Troubleshoot and then click on Advanced Options. In the next menu that pops up, select UEFI Firmware Settings and then click on Restart again.