I have bought a new mainboard, CPU, RAM and M.2 drive in order to build a new Windows 11 system, but I wanted to keep my old Windows 10 system too. I had several spare ATX PSUs already.
This meant I needed to buy a new Windows 11 licence, so I managed to do this really quickly and easily by going to TurnKey Point, selecting Windows 11 Pro and paying £7.90. The key was immediately shown and an email was also sent to me. I plugged this into the Activation field in Settings - Activation and voila, Windows 11 was now activated, Simples!
Components
I needed a mainboard with at least 6 SATA drive connectors, so I went for these components using the 'RipTide' version of the AsRock Z790.
Hopefully, this system will last me another 10 years.
The only problem I had was that the BIOS in the RipTide board does not fully support CSM (BIOS compatibility) unless I add a PCI graphics card. It seems that CSM-compatible VGA graphics code is not included in the AsRock BIOS - I am guessing that is because there is a licensing cost for this code (IBM VGA code + others) and Asus didn't want to pay it!
So in order to boot USB drives or other drives (e.g. old Windows 10 system drives with MBR partitions), I need to fit a graphics card even though the mainboard had perfectly adequate onboard graphics supplied by the i7 CPU! Very annoying!
I guess this is why the description for the BIOS was:
- BIOS- 128Mb AMI UEFI Legal BIOS with GUI support
and it explains the word 'Legal' in the description - i.e. many mainboard manufacturers were not paying the VGA BIOS code royalties contained within their CSM code and so the BIOSes were illegal!
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