I've just built a new system using the GA-P55A-UD7 motherboard, an i7 860 CPU, etc... and have installed Windows 7 on there.
I have an SSD boot drive and two drives in RAID 1 that I will use for data. I'm using a fanless Sapphire Radeon HD 5550 1GB PCI-E graphics card & 6GB of RAM.
Is there a recommended procedure for installing this system?
I have lots of experience building WinXP systems way back in the day when Pentium4 was the latest CPU, but not since then. Those days, you installed
- Windows XP
- All the drivers from the motherboard vendor's website
- Graphics card drivers
- Drivers for other components, like sound cards, usb devices, etc...
Now, as a first stab with this system, I installed Windows 7, then installed the mobo drivers from the CD, then the graphics drivers from the CD. The system was rather sluggish, the Windows Experience score was below 3 and generally seemed wrong. I regretted even taking the manufacturer's CDs out of their sleeves!
So, I reinstalled using the method in the list above and the system was VERY unstable and blue screened regularly.
Next, I reinstalled using the list above, only I skipped most drivers except the chipset INF, the graphics card and the Intel RAID driver. Still, the system is unstable and blue screens regularly when doing nothing other than copying data from a USB drive to the RAID drives.
I've uninstalled the Intel RAID s/w and it seems to have stabilised now, but I'm not convinced that I am getting the best out of the machine.
Reading around, for Windows 7, it almost sounds like I should completely skip ALL of the motherboard drivers and just install the graphics card driver.
What are others doing? Do you have any success after installing the drivers from Gigabyte's website? Or do you just ignore some/all of them?