Does anyone bother with motherboard drivers?

[Taz]

I've installed Windows 10 at least 5 times over the last couple of months for various reasons. For the first couple of installs I installed the motherboard drivers from the manfacturer's website. For the last 3+ installs, I haven't bothered to install any motherboard drivers.

I've noticed no lack or performance or stability when I haven't installed the drivers from the manufacturers site. In fact, my PC runs better if I let Windows 10 decide which drivers to install. I've noticed that the motherboard manufacturer's apps cause me more problems by being buggy and very intrusive.

So, do people bother with motherboard drivers these days?

[watercooled]

I never go anywhere near the apps supplied by the motherboard manufacturer (and am forever telling friends to leave the CD in the box) - they've been the cause of more problems than I care to remember on both mine and friends' systems, either overclocking without permission, not making it clear that 'turbo mode' or similar means it will do a rubbish auto-overclock and kill reliability, or buggy nonsense that causes anything from interrupt storms to BSODs.

As for drivers - more often than not, especially for more mature platforms, Windows will select acceptable drivers itself. For some newer platforms I've found it can help to download up to date drivers from AMD/Intel directly as MS can be very slow to roll out new drivers, with the excuse of ensuring stability (but that didn't stop Win10 auto-updating Skylake IGP drivers with ones which cased endless BSODs on one of my systems). Occasionally I'll visit the mobo manufacturer's website to find drivers if there's a need to e.g. Windows doesn't find any, or installs buggy ones. Also, Windows sometimes doesn't include drivers for the NIC by default so it's necessary to download those, or install them from the CD but being very careful not to allow it to auto-install it's buggy rubbish alongside!

[Millennium]

I like to be thorough but I will rarely install anything but a BIOS from a mobo manufacturer, went straight to Intel for Z170 drivers and Skylake GPU drivers, and AMD for a recent Ryzen build.

Ryzen Master is pretty cool too...

[adidan]

Only on laptops, I've found some can be really funky unless you load the exact drivers that it's meant to have. Not sure why.

BIOS is a different matter.

[watercooled]

Hmm yeah that's a good point about laptops - I think some manufacturers customise the drivers in some way so downloading straight from AMD/Intel may not work properly. But still, it's not really the drivers I'm mostly concerned about, it's the apps/utilities which install alongside them.

[Taz]

I agree about the BIOS, that's always worth getting from the manufacturer's website.

[DanceswithUnix]

I usually check to see if Administer Hardware comes up with any unknown hardware. Occasionally (or on laptops usually) something will pop up there and I go hunt it down.

I usually try to avoid utilities, though for my wife's PC I did install the Asrock overclocking application to lower power consumption and control the fans.

[wazzickle]

I generally update the bios / uefi for PCs and leave it at that. When it comes to laptops there is sometimes some useful bespoke software like a battery manager or something but you can happily get by classifying it all as bloatware and keeping it clean.

[Kumagoro]

If we are talking drivers in the system section of decide manager I also have never noticed any difference. However I do tend to grab the drivers and manually update them as they never seen to go in just running the chipset install for Intel at least. I really wish there was an update all drivers function which checks the folder you point it at.

When imaging Windows, If the drivers are injected into the driver store before it will put them in on boot.

[Biscuit]

Only on laptops, I've found some can be really funky unless you load the exact drivers that it's meant to have. Not sure why.

BIOS is a different matter.

But once its working, would you ever think to update them?

Im not sure I would or ever have really.

[adidan]

But once its working, would you ever think to update them?

Im not sure I would or ever have really.

BIOS if there are drastic functional updates or, in reality, i've mainly updated BIOSes for cpu support updates.

Not something i do alot but i think i've probably done it more than install motherboard drivers.

Generally though if it works i leave it alone.

[virtuo]

Always try and keep the BIOS up to date. I tend to buy ASUS boards which seem to split the driver packages up individually. I'll update chipset drivers if there are stability concerns, but the rest I tend not to bother with.

[Wozza63]

I only really used AI Suite to update chipset for Ryzen. You don't really want the old chipset drivers for Ryzen!

I did use it on an old FX build, it was ok for fan control and manual overclocking, though auto overclock made my system crash whenever I tried.

Never tried from anyone but ASUS.

[watercooled]

Yeah I've come across multiple issues with the software performing rubbish auto-overclocks. I was helping a friend to diagnose constant BSODs with his system (which I had no physical access to) - the conversation was something like 'Have you overclocked' ... 'no' ... 'are you sure' ... 'no, it's definitely not overclocked'. After a while suggesting other things to try with no success, he finally revealed that he'd let the motherboard utilities install and had selected something like 'performance mode', which of course turned out to be auto-overclocking. The BSODs stopped immediately after he got rid of it and returned to BIOS defaults.

IMO it's plain stupid that any software would perform an overclock on hardware without making it crystal clear what it's doing, e.g. by making the user type out 'overclock' or something before they can click through. It's not the only time I've come across overclocked systems with stability problems when the owner thought it was stock. It often just leaves the user blaming the manufacturer of some random component when no hardware is actually at fault.

[MartinoMods]

I'm generally in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" camp. That applies to graphics card drivers usually as well. But I'm the type to wait for a complete edition of a game to come out with all DLC and Expansions, and be on sale on Steam for $5-10 before I snatch it up years after release when it's gotten positive reviews and shown its worth it, rather than paying $60+ to be an alpha tester for games that flop for at least the first year and just disappoint folks.