Virtualization not available on Gigabyte GA-Z87-HD3 motherboard

I recently brought a new computer with a Gigabyte GA-Z87-HD3 motherboard, but Virtualization wasn’t working.

The guys at Centre Com (http://www.centrecom.com.au/) were great (http://www.yelp.com.au/biz/centre-com-clayton#hrid:3kp_e9aHHYtsXwRxN79iFg) and I was soon installing all my development tools.

Then Oracle Virtual Box insisted that Virtualization was not supported. Huh? I checked the BIOS settings and Intel Virtualization Technology was enabled (which the documentation said was the default). Reboot a couple of times – no change. Checked with Speccy (http://www.piriform.com/speccy) and it reported that Virtualization was supported but not enabled. Checked the BIOS again – definitely enabled. Even tried disabling it, rebooting, enabling, and rebooting again. No joy.

The only clue I could find was a rather vague reference to a BIOS update (version F6) on a web forum. Checked the Gigabyte site and F6 was the latest version of the BIOS (http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4489#bios) (the motherboard had version F4). So I downloaded it and performed a BIOS flash update. Reboot and Virtualization was working perfectly. Hooray!

Why did Gigabyte let this motherboard out the factory with such an obvious defect and why didn’t they document the issue / resolution? Who knows, but everything is working now and with 16GB RAM and a 120GB SSD drive, it is super fast.

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