After seeing somewhat mixed acceptance of the newer UEFI standard on the Intel boards, would I be better off going with either an AMD system,,,Am-2 OR am-3? Will this get 'around' these is? If so what are the corresponding 'numbers' to an LGA 1155/ i-3 system?
Not interested in gaming, but do need pretty good graphics to run trading charts.

Going with an AMD system won't necessarily avoid the problem. UEFI is the newest standard for BIOS. What you need to find out, is can you turn off secure boot. The spec for UEFI says you should be able to, however, before you invest in the system board, investigate to see it the boards you are interested in , secure boot can, or can not be turned off. Different UEFI (BIOS) manufacturers call legacy boot different things, so it takes some understanding to sort it out.

I have been reading some people have installed linux in secure boot mode. It is not trivial, and don't rely on that, unless you are very familiar with UEFI, signing keys and all the stuff that goes with it.

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EVERY new board has UEFI now and there is no need to not buy them because of it.

The secure boot thingie is in fact comprised of 2 issues as far as Linux is concerned:

1. The ability to disable 'secure boot' and boot the system without it. This is by far the simplest solution (and safest on certain hardware).

And every one i saw until now - I have seen one ASUS FM1 board, one ASUS 1155 board, a Gigabyte FM2 board (this is what i use now with Linux) had the option to turn off 'secure boot' and specify the boot method as UEFI or 'legacy' (BIOS).
Probably all separately sold boards (and not only) have this. Mind you, older Windows versions wont work with secure boot either.

I read some KB articles on the MS site about hardware replacements and stuff and there was said that in the case of replacing/adding hardware with Win 8 there are cases where you will get bluescreens and these can only be solved if secure boot is turned off momentarily (which means that youre f***** if this option is missing in the UEFI). So, even MS needs it and i think the Windows 8 certification expressly requires this option.

2. The ability to boot Linux with 'secure boot' enabled. This is NOT required if point 1. can be done. This can be tricky and honestly i never used it nor i plan to. On certain hardware such as some Samsung laptops the system was rendered unusable by this method (the manufacturers fault it seems but anyway).


PS. There is much talk about this issue (of locking Linux out etc), but so far it turned out to be just FUD since the 'secure boot' can be turned off.

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