EX38-DS4 upgrade from E8400 to Q9550

[mortemas]

OK, I have a GA-EX38-DS4 since 2010 which has served me well, but I decided to upgrade my processor to a Quad Core Q9550 from a Core 2 Duo E8400 to breathe a bit more life into my system before I finally invest in a Haswell system ($1000+, vs $100 spent on the Q9550).

I am currently running bios F5 and the Q9550 needs F6c.  Problem is when I update to F6c my computer won't boot into windows 7.  If I flash back to bios F5 again the system is fine.  Any advice about all the steps I need to take to do this upgrade successfully?  I haven't even installed the Q9550 yet and it seems I've hit a wall

[autotech]

Far as I can tell there is only 1 revision of that board and that CPU requires bios F6c. F6c is a beta bios if it was me I would stay at F5 unless it isn't seeing it right. Beta bios means it isn't ready for prime time.

Try emailing gigabyte support they might have another bios you can try.

Also that beta bios is over 5 years old .

[mortemas]

Far as I can tell there is only 1 revision of that board and that CPU requires bios F6c. F6c is a beta bios if it was me I would stay at F5 unless it isn't seeing it right. Beta bios means it isn't ready for prime time.

Try emailing gigabyte support they might have another bios you can try.

Also that beta bios is over 5 years old .

Hi, autotech.  thanks for your reply.  I hear you - 5 yrs old is pretty long in the tooth, but I'm willing to give this a try.  In addition to needing F6c for my processor, that bios version updates the AHCI driver from an ancient 1.07 to a more tolerable 1.20 which I'd hoped would clear up an issue I was having with my optical sata drives.

I am worried that maybe I need to re-install Win7 for the beta bios to be accepted by it. By the way, I have the same concern about the quad core not being accepted by windows.  I'm thinking it is not totally transparent to the OS.  Assuming I can get by with the F5 bios or somehow successfully boot with F6c, will Win7 simply install new drivers after a "found new hardware" message or will I have to jump through some hoops to get the Q9550 going?

[mortemas]

Just to update here, I was finally able to get the computer to boot into windows! I did a few things at the same time so it's difficult to say which one was the fix.  One thing was I messed with the gigabyte sata chip settings a couple of times, but ultimately I decided to just disable it because I don't have anything connected there (if I understand correctly it is for the IDE connector).  Also, the details of what happened when I had tried the F6c bios is that windows would BEGIN to load, but wouldn't get beyond the animated logo screen.  At this point the hard drive access light would light half way, then eventually go full on and the computer would be frozen at this point.  Then, when I would reboot, windows would bring me to a repair screen.  The other day when it happened I selected to try the repair, but THIS time I bypassed the repair option and whaddaya know it booted into windows!  Again, not  sure if disabliing the giga sata chip or bypassing the repair did it,  but now I can move on to installing the Q9550.  Should I expect that to be a fairly straightforward process?

[mortemas]

Final update. Processor upgrade went well.  After installing the Q9550 I selected Load Optimized Settings in bios, saved, restarted, and then set everything else how I needed it.  Then booted into Win7 64 bit and it recognized the new processor and loaded the new driver for it and restarted to apply changes.  There is one other setting, I have no idea what it was, but when I ran Passmark 7 performance test it asked if I wanted to apply optimal settings to the processor so I just clicked yes.  Anyone know what it could have been?

[autotech]

It usually makes it where it runs at high performance. Same as if you went into screen saver and clicked on power settings.