Questions on Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H

[8bit]

Built a new PC yesterday, specs are as follows:

i7 3770
Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H
16GB (4x 4GB) Crucial Ballistix Tactical DDR3 (1600MHz, 8-8-8-24)
Radeon HD 7950

Built it all up, plugged all peripherals in, hit the power button and... absolutely nothing, no life whatsoever. Couple of hours messing about then some googling and worked out I had to clear the CMOS before it would power up

Anyway, I haven't had much of a chance to get it set up or play with it yet but have a couple of questions:

1 - The CPU speed is always reported as 3.9GHz (the Turbo frequency) even when nothing is happening. I was expecting it to run at the normal 3.4GHz most of the time. What's up with that?

2 - The BIOS reports the memory is running at 1333MHz and timings of 9-9-9-24, but it's rated to 1600MHz and 8-8-8-24. Am I safe enough to manually set it as such? I'd have thought it would auto-detect and set it correctly.

The motherboard BIOS is a bit old (F8 installed, F14 is available), would a BIOS update clear up the above?

3 - I'm interested in installing a small mSATA SSD to use the Intel Smart Response technology, where the SSD is used as a cache for the HDD. I gather I'll have to change the Intel SATA controller to RAID mode to be able to do that. Is there any way of doing it without destroying the contents of the hard disk?

TIA
8bit

[itsbehind]

Did you ever figure this out???

"1 - The CPU speed is always reported as 3.9GHz (the Turbo frequency) even when nothing is happening. I was expecting it to run at the normal 3.4GHz most of the time. What's up with that?"

I have exactly the same issue.