Gigabyte's GA-EX58-Extreme

Congrats on the new laptops, Betsy! And yes, we think we can help with your problems. Let's tackle your husband's issue first. Because his machine is on the network and getting Internet access, his problem is most likely related to one of three things: the work­group name, network discovery, or firewall settings. On your hus­band's machine, make sure his workgroup name matches yours (and the WinXP machine's) in the Advanced System Settings. Also, be sure to enable network discovery in the Advanced Sharing Settings. Finally, ifhis notebook came with a preinstalled third­party security suite, try searching for the printer with the suite's firewall disabled. Having seen this issue many times in the past few months, we'd bet that there's an overly restrictive software firewall running on your husband's machine that needs to be tamed a bit. The error you're receiving when you try to print sounds like some sort of incompatibility between Win7 and the printer's dri­vers or WinXP's print spooler. The first thing to try to remedy the situation is to install the latest drivers for your printer and then reconnect to it on your laptop. If that doesn't help, you can try bypassing the spooler altogether and printing directly to the printer. On the WinXP machine, open the printer properties and then dick the Advanced tab. On the Advanced tab, you'll see an option labeled "Print Directly To Printer." Select that option, apply the changes, restart your machine, and try printing from the new Win7 laptop again.

I recently decided I'd upgrade my aging Core i7­920 quad-core chip (I know, just kidding: It's not that old) to some­thing of the six-core variety from Intel. However, I'm having some issues with my motherboard now, and I'm wondering if I'll have to rip that out since it might not support the new 32nm chips properly. I have a Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme motherboard, and it always has performed really well with my 920 chip. I recently purchased a Core i7-970, since it cost about $150 less and has only 133MHz slower core clock than the Core i7-980X. Unfortunately, my GA-EX58 mobo won't boot at all with it, but if I swap the chip back to the Core i7-920, it boots just fine. I tried grabbing the latest BIOS from the Gigabyte site, but no matter what I do, I get a flash program error saying it's an "incompatible BIOS file," or something like that. I'm stuck and not sure what to do. Any clues? I'd hate to have to return the Core i7-970 or upgrade the motherboard. Also, did I go wrong picking up the Core i7-970? Should I have sprung for the extra money and got a 980X? Are there any other performance differences in the new 970 chip I should know of?

A: Fear not, Bob. You can probably get that board to wake up just fine with your new Core i7-970. (By the way, we like your practical approach of choosing a new processor.) The Core i7­970, like the top-end Core i7-980X, has 12MB of shared L3 cache backing its six processing cores. Other than the dock speed differences you mentioned, the only other difference between the 970 and 980X is the QPI interface speed, which is 4.8GTps for the 970 vs. 6.4GTps for the 980X. You're not going to see much, if any, difference in performance due to QPI speed, however. In general your performance for lightly threaded or single-threaded apps should drop in just under a Core i7-975 quad core.

 

Now, on to your motherboard issue. We've seen this many times over the years, when Intel or AMD release a new core revision, especially chips that have new power requirements, like Intel's new 32nm Gulf town core. Although Intel designs many core migrations to be socket-compatible (though it's not always the case), it's up to motherboard manufacturers to ensure their power supply and regulation components on the motherboard, along with the BIOS microcode that supports it, are compatible with new chip requirements. In your case, the good news is that your Gigabyte motherboard should work with that Core i7 -970 just fine. Likely, what you need to do is go back to Gigabyte's Web site and download older revision BIOS images, perhaps as far back as when Gigabyte introduced the first version that supported Intel's new six-core CPUs for that motherboard. Many times, trying to flash-upgrade with the most recent revision of a BIOS image will fail because, somewhere along the way, the BIOS image check routine of the flash upgrade program determined that your cur­rent BIOS image was too old to be considered upgradable. So, in short, you need to perform at least one incremental upgrade from an older BIOS revision before you can move forward and flash­upgrade the BIOS to the latest revision. Once you flash to a BIOS image that is compatible with the most current version, you should be good to go.

At the very least, you should be able to download an older revision of the BIOS that fully supports your new Core i7-970 chip. Good luck!

 

by Dave Altavilla and Marco Chiappetta, the experts over at HotHardware.com.

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