LGA socket / motherboard question. Please respond quickly.

[Enthusiast]

Hello everyone.

I'm in search of a new motherboard, and it looks like all the motherboards are LGA 1156 or 1356 (socket), and my current quad core is LGA 755 (Q6600 I believe, GO stepping and oc'd to 3.2Ghz). Does that mean it won't be compatible because it's too old?

(my old motherboard isn't compatible with windows 7, no matter what I try to do. It's old; the disc doesn't even load in windows 7.)


So what motherboard should I get? I have a radeon 5850 and am looking for any board as long as it supports crossfire; I don't want an SLi-capable motherboard because I don't have Nvidia.
Also it must be compatible with windows 7?

 

[o1die]

I would look at a low end p45 board, such as the foxconn p45 ELA for around $82 shipped. You only have one video card; to spend $100 more on a ddr2 x48 board makes no sense, especially on old technology..

 

[Enthusiast]

Will it be compatible with Win 7?

 

[Enthusiast]

(It's 64 bit Win 7)

 

[4745454b]

my old motherboard isn't compatible with windows 7, no matter what I try to do. It's old; the disc doesn't even load in windows 7

I find this hard to believe. If its running a Q6600, then its a newer chipset. The oldest it could be is the 975/965. Win7 supports this chipset, its not that old. There is no way win7 only supports the newest stuff.

Just because Win7 doesn't load doesn't mean its your mobo. Is your bios set to boot from the CD first? Do you have to push a button to make it load from the cd drive? Have you tried a newer DVD drive?

 

[Enthusiast]

Okay, so my current mobo is a P5N-D. It supports LGA 775, and no matter how hard I try, I can't get anything to work in Win7.

The network driver is nonexistent; the cd doesn't load because it says the os is unsupported. even when I downloaded the latest drivers for it (nforce 750 SLi Windows 7 64 bit drivers on the Nvidia website) it didn't help.

Here's what I mean:

On the installation screen, the only thing that I could install was the Nvidia Storage, even though there were a bunch of things besides that that it was supposed to install. So after it installed that, I clicked on the Ethernet setup (network driver wasn't working, like I said) and it failed to install.

It's really bothering me and I'm downgrading to XP because apparently the 5850 works in XP and that's all I care about right now.
I'm not willing to spend another $300 just so I can use Windows 7 and my 5850.

Help?

 

[Enthusiast]

For some stupid reason, the forum isn't letting me edit my posts.
I'll just have to double post.

Windows 7 does load, it's that everything that I want to load doesn't.
My P5N-D CD doesn't load, my 5850 drivers cd fails to install correctly, and my network driver is nonexistent / broken / something, but I can't connect to the internet to fix it. (How stupid is that? Didn't they have that sort of thing in mind when they made it? That maybe if the network driver isn't working, that I won't be able to connect to the internet to fix it?)

 

[4745454b]

Your board had the 750i chipset. I'm sure its supported by win7. I'm not sure what the problem is however. Have you tried the Asus drivers? I'm hoping someone else can suggest something because I'm not sure whats going on.

 

[capt_taco]

It really sounds like your problem was that the motherboard was running on old XP drivers, which won't work with Windows 7. Then it sounds like you tried to download and install the drivers for a different motherboard, if I'm reading your second post correctly.

Is that what happened? I don't think you'll find ASUS drivers on the Nvidia website. If that's what you did, it may have screwed things up even worse.

I'd recommend using a different computer to download the new drivers from the ASUS site, bring them over to the troubled system, and install them. Although you'd also be smart to format the hard drive first on that machine to avoid any lingering issues.

Whatever is on the CDs probably won't work anyway, because they were probably made long before Windows 7 was released. So ignore them for now.

In any case, the issue is NOT that your board is "incompatible" with Windows 7. A quick Google search turns up plenty of people using that exact same board for Windows 7, so don't give up.

 

[4745454b]

Wouldn't the CD drivers have the vista drivers? Wouldn't they work on win7? I agree that using a different computer to get the drivers you need is the way to go.

 

[Enthusiast]

Thanks a lot guys. I've downloaded the drivers onto a flash drive and will see what I can do with them on the computer. I'm currently going through the process of reinstalling win 7. All the files that needed to be rid of were formatted so now there should be no windows xp drivers.

Like I said, the CD gives an error when I try to open it, so I can't install the Vista drivers that were on the CD.

 

[Enthusiast]

So the drivers didn't help at all. The only drivers that installed were the Storage and SMU drivers. There was an Ethernet folder inside of the chipset setup, but for some reason it was ignored. So I clicked on the NAM (Network Access Manager) setup (inside the Ethernet folder) and it failed to install, telling me my Nvidia drivers were not installed correctly.


I'd like to know why my drivers never install correctly, because it's really bothering me that I still have no internet.

Update: I got the motherboard to recognize the 5850. Yay!

But the ethernet driver still doesn't work.

 

[4745454b]

Can you update the net driver through the controll panel? Point it to the downloaded NIC drivers and see if that works. Don't forget to decompress them if need be.

 

[capt_taco]

Thanks a lot guys. I've downloaded the drivers onto a flash drive and will see what I can do with them on the computer. I'm currently going through the process of reinstalling win 7. All the files that needed to be rid of were formatted so now there should be no windows xp drivers.

Like I said, the CD gives an error when I try to open it, so I can't install the Vista drivers that were on the CD.

I don't mean to harp on the same issue constantly, but which drivers did you download? Were they from the ASUS site or the nvidia site? From the nvidia site, you can probably get the chipset drivers and nothing else. BIOS updates and ethernet drivers would have to come from the ASUS site.

Who knows if the drivers on the original mobo CD would work. I've heard of Vista drivers working on Win7, but that's an old enough board that they could be early Vista drivers that won't work for whatever reason. I'm just suspicious because the only thing that changed on his system was Win7 (as far as I can tell). Whatever came on the 5850 CD might be recent enough to be OK. But the rest of the drivers are still suspect to me.

It really sounds to me like this could be an issue of being confused about what drivers to get, and from where. If not, then it would have to be a random hardware failure that just coincidentally happened to occur at the same time a new OS was installed. The odds against that are pretty long.

 

[jive]

DId you used the RC version of windows 7 ... I have issue to with that, but when I get an OEM version of windows 7 ultimate, everything works find after that. I don't even have to load driver from asus at first , work 100% . I donwload the asus driver after that only the one whql for windows 7 and do the same for my video card .