Thank you, Serg. The Dell SLIC 2.4 is working. However, the Gigabyte SLIC 2.1 version returns an invalid image error on flashing. I downloaded it twice and tried flashing twice to be sure, to no avail. Are you able to post a repaired version? Many thanks.
Problem is i have a rive which has started to fail and if it was possible i would have prefered to avoid win10 alltogether, sadly the asus x79 boards do run better with win 8 than win 7 but i can live with it if there is no other option.