Talk:VTd HowTo

• --1Samildanach 05:03, 7 June 2012 (UTC) : I have attempted to contact a few motherboard manufacturers directly. It has been a week and ASRock has not gotten back to me (it was hard to find an email address, too). Asus has very limited contact options, and the person I talked to by phone was unable to find information on VT-d. MSI and Gigabyte, however, were quite prompt and helpful. Here are the boards they listed:

MSI: Z77A-GD80, Z77A-GD65, Z77A-GD55, Z77A-G45, and Z77A-G43     
        
Gigabyte: GA-X79-UD5 (rev. 1.0), GA-X79-UD7 (rev. 1.0) and GA-Z77X-D3H (rev. 1.0)

• --Lars.kurth 08:40, 7 June 2012 (UTC) : I am quite happy for you to update the main page with the information you found, unless you are looking for somebody to do a quick sanity check. Thank you for the efforts.

• --1Samildanach 06:59, 13 June 2012 (UTC) : Done. Feel free to change the wording if you can think of a clearer way of putting it. May also be worth contacting them again in six months or so, to get information on any boards released in that time... though I might not remember to do so.

• --Przemoc86 19:31, 3 February 2013 (UTC) : Regarding ASRock Z77 Extreme4 & Extreme6: I am planning on buying one of these mobos so I did some research on the Internet and I think the warning stated here about the recent BIOSes cutting down vt-d functionality may be wrong, but I am not sure yet. On the Extreme6 Download page we can read in relevant BIOSes descriptions:

  Modify VT-d Capability will be unsupported after flashing BIOS P2.30.

  which may be read as "turning off possibility to change its enable state" (such sites are known for pretty bad English). I know that ASRock America Support wrote about Extreme4 to Chetyre user from overclock.net forum that:

  After you update the BIOS with the 2.70 the VT-D not longer works

  but it's not a good source of knowledge, because front-line support people are often quite incompetent. (Well, there are naming mistakes in BIOSes too, like I showed once, thus double or triple checking is almost always required.)
  Moreover, there is at least one source stating that vt-d still works after upgrade. abel user from tom's hardware forum responded to question about 2.30 and 2.40:

  I ran across the 2.30 BIOS after I updated while reinstalling Win7 64. Here's what I found: the VTd still worked, it just did not show up in the BIOS pages as a choice (along with VTi). I can confirm this, because I had my discrete video card connected directly to my monitor at the same time I had VirtuMVP enabled. If VTd didn't work, I would have had no monitor image at all. BIOS 2.40 fixed the user interface on the BIOS page, that's all. In sum, the functionality in 2.30 was always there.

  I can agree it's not explicitly stated here whether abel used 2.40 in the end, so I'll try to contact him to confirm that.
• --Przemoc86 00:50, 16 February 2013 (UTC): I received the first confirmation that ASRock Z77 Extreme6 supports VT-d in BIOS v2.40. Quoting Keroberos from his blog http://mo.kerosoft.com/0198:

  Initially, the BIOS was P2.30 with VT-d capability "Unsupported" when I bought Z77 Extreme6. The default "VT-d" value was "Disabled" as you pointed out. Above first capture image is "VT-d Enabled" because I have enabled it. Of course, it didn't work VT-d capability completely.
  
  After upgrading BIOS to P2.40, all setting parameters had been reset to initial state. The second image was captured at this moment. Then I switched "VT-d" settings on, and it works perfectly. As an evidence, I added one more capture image with working VT-d capability in VMware ESXi.