This problem might not exist just with intel motherboards but can be applied to any brand.
I have been running Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit for a couple years now on my Dell Precision with 0 problems. So, naturally I decided it was time to upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate.
Much to my dismay, after performing a fresh installation of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Edition I found that it was acting very strange. Sometimes it would sit for a few seconds when I did simple things like close a window or open the Start Menu. It was very slow. Furthermore, the hard drive light was always on and the hard drive was always making sounds.
I knew this had to be a driver issue because the machine had worked flawlessly under the heavy pressures of Vista. So I started by flashing the BIOS. That didn’t work. I tried updating my display drivers and that did nothing.
I decided to see if I needed to update the Intel Chipset driver and it turns out that solved everything. Microsoft has done a good job of making sure Windows 7 gets all of the correct drivers during installation as all of my other machines have worked flawlessly.
Download and install Chipset Drivers
Unfortunately, Intel doesn’t have any Windows 7 x64 specific drivers: (maybe not so true now)
However, using the Vista x64 drivers did the trick and everything works great now.