X58 Chipset Update  

You're worrying about nothing here. All you need to do is load the latest drivers and let them do what they do. Don’t worry about what device manager has to say about version numbers. Furthermore unless you are having problems with your board, you really don’t need to update them all the time. I’m an update nut and even I’ve stop worrying about those.

BTW I do have an X58 chipset – Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5.

As to the latest drivers – you should check your motherboard’s website to see what were the last ones released for that board.The latest ones Intel has are here - Intel® Chipset Device Software (INF Update Utility). The Release notes state they support the 5 series chipset (X58)

Now what you might want to do seeing that you have an SSD drive is make sure your board is set the AHCI if your drive supports it. AHCI should be set in the BIOS if the setting is there, which it should be for an X85 board. You may also want to make sure you have the latest Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST). Get them here

And "QPI" (Quick Path Interconnect) is a BIOS thing only. In the simplest terms it basically allows for a quicker path the memory. I’m sure someone here will correct me/expand on it, but that’s it in a nutshell. At any rate you won’t see that setting in device manager.

Good luck

Fyi...

I am not worried, I am asking why the differences. You can ask and not worry and that's where I am at.

That's what I am doing, just loading the latest when I saw this. I got two new SSD's, tossed the old mechanical ones and RAIDed, but I had to do a full install; hence why I saw all this occurring. I do not update them all the time, just when I have to wipe out my drive and re-install the whole O/S.

As for Intel, yes my theory was correct. Even if you see the version number, it does not mean that will be the version you get so the highest (according to Intel) for X58 is 9.1.1.1026, there is nothing higher than that. The 9.3.0.1019 is for newer boards so again, my theory was correct, they are just bundling everything.

Thank you for contacting Intel Technical Support.
What you have being reported in your system is completely normal and your theory correct.


Sincerely,

========
Intel Customer Support
Diego


I do not need ahci; as I stated that I am in RAID 0 for my drives, BIOS has been set correctly since day 1.



Thanks for the QPI info. I just could not remember. Thanks.

Yes I knew that. Please, you might want to do "your" homework. Using Crucial M4's which have the greatest Garbage Collection, built for RAID. You need to leave your system at "idle" to have GC start. I had a great discussion with the Crucial engineers, you really need to have your PC at idle! No A/V in the background, no sort of any activity on the drive; reads or writes.

Have these in another computer for 2 months, still not seeing any performance hit; Testing ATTO, CrystalDiskMark, HD Tune, AIDA64, PCMark Vantage hard drive and data tests, AS SSD and a couple more. All show a downward performance hit when no GC, machine being used then shutdown. Let system idle, when GC is done, performance is less than .1% of when I got the drives new.

That article only covers SandForce controllers and why they suck at RAID, however the new Intel RAID drivers (version 11 something) will have TRIM pass through RAID so not sweating that. X79 boards are suppose to be able to handle this, but issues are arising. But I am confident they will work this out and you will be able to have TRIM pass to the SSD in a RAID setup. Crucial on the other hand has the Marvell controller, built for data protection, hence GC to cover RAID set ups. They are better and there is no need for TRIM, unless you have a single drive which Crucial also has that built in.

Thanks for the article though, I do skim that websites reviews