Hi All
New to this forum but not totally to Gigabyte motherboards
I have waiting to be built the following:-
GA-P55A-UD4 rev 2.0
i5 760 (as not gaming will be using the Intel stock cooler)
RAM G.Skill - 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3
Graphics Card - Palit nVidia GTS450 Sonic Platinum
Optical Drive - LG GH22LS50 DVDRW
PSU- Corsair HX 650W modular
HDDs - 2 off 500GB WD Caviar Black and 1 off 1TB WD Caviar Black (NB this is a SATA3 model)
OS - Windows 7 64 bit
Note - all drives including the optical are SATA
My planned build is to use one of the 500GB drives partitioned into two during OS install this being for the OS on one and programs on the other, the other 500GB will be for scratch and possibly the Page File (though I have read that Win7 plays nicer if the Page File is on the OS drive is that so???) & some data, the 1TB will be purely for data.
I will be uisng my old Lian Li case (currently housing my old [now defunct] Gigabyte 845e chipset board system)
So to my questions
1) I have downloaded all the current drivers (and most of the utilities) also the manual - now the drivers I have selected are of course those that specify Win7 but note that the manual is still rev 2001 and no mention of Win7 is made. It has been out a while so why has the manual not been updated to reflect the possibly unique installation procedures etc for Win7? And is there a Win7 install guide I can download?
2) Talking of drivers - the included CD has "Xpress Install" but as I have downloaded the most current versions please tell me the best order to install these in following the OS install?
3) ref SATA control - the default is IDE but I have read that even when not using RAID that AHCI has some benefits such as hotswapping of eSATA drives not that I have any such drive yet. I have read mixed reviews of how well AHCI installs go and that sometimes on an AHCI setup SATA optical drives sometimes have strange problems! For the record I was during the build only going to install the OS with one physical drive connected and connect the other two after OS setup and use the "Disk Management" to sort them out. So is AHCI worth the possible hassle in a non RAID system??? And talking of the manual, mention is made of needing a floppy with the drivers but this is for XP & Vista and as I understand Win7 natively supports AHCI so no driver floppy needed espcially as I was not going to include a floppy in this build.
3a) I was going to connect the 1TB to the SATA3 port so anything I need to be especially aware of doing this??? Such as maybe connecting it to a SATA2 port first i.e. shift to the SATA3 after I have installed the SATA3 drivers???
4) @BIOS feature & usage - as I will not be installing a floppy drive, how relaible is the @BIOS method of updating the BIOS bearing in mind at this stage thought eh motherboard is brand new I have no way yet of knowing version of the BIOS it has onboard?
TIA for any guidance and feedback etc