GA-X58-USB3 BIOS problems

Good morning TH Community,

I’m having a few problems with my new build rig. I recently brought the following: GB X58-USB3 MBO, an Intel i7 950 Bloomfield, 8Gb of Kingston Ram (DDR3 1066Mhz), an OCZ 850 PSU and a PNY Nvidia GTX 570.

I did a fresh install on windows 7 64 bit as is advisable with all new hardware. The installation went without incidence.

I went to put the MBO drivers on and got as far as the NEC USB 3.0 driver and the whole system froze. I tried doing a hard boot but this did not work. Instead of the system going through BIOS then POST the system did nothing. All of the fans are working I’ve checked the PSU connections, switched out all of the components one by one but can’t find any problems with the hardware. Individually (apart from the MBO) they all work fine. This lead me to think that I may need to clear the COMS or dare I say it flash my BIOS. I cleared the COMS but with no joy. As far as I can tell it has to be a BIOS issue but I don’t know how to resolve it because I can't flash the BISO when the system does not even get that far in the initalization process.

The installed BIOS is F3 Gigabyte (I don’t know the major minor version numbers sorry!). Can anyone assist me please?

well for one thing 8gb gb ddr3 1066mhz doesnt sound right

thats a triple channel motherboard and would usually be 6gb of ddr3 1600mhz ram or 12gb ddr3 1600mhz

so normally 3 or 6 memory modules

also its a gigabyte board so should have 2 bios chips--read the motherboard manual to see if the cd/dvd that came

with the board has a utility to recover it from the second bios chip

had a read of the manual

the restore from the second bios is now automatic on newer gigabyte boards if the main bios is faulty or

corrupted--so the user cant access the second bios anymore

did you use the cmos jumper to clear the cmos? next to the battery--power off pc and remove mains lead and move

the jumper for about 15 seconds--make sure to move the jumper back before powering up the pc

you can still flash the bios if windows wont load by pressing the end key to enter qflash--though you need a fat

formatted flash drive or usb hard drive to load the bios from

f3 is the latest stable bios though there are 2 newer beta bios versions f5a and f5c

the old irish screwdriver comes in handy sometimes

did you make sure to put the cmos jumper back in the original position after clearing the cmos?

make sure your ram is in the correct ram slots. on x58 boards they need to be in a specific order depending on how much ram you use. check the manual for the correct configuration.
not doing this may allow the system to boot 1s but as soon as bios updates it will cause the system to lock up at the next power on. also on first boot go straight to bios and load optimized default. not doing so can cause they system to mis-configure the cpu properties.