Windows 8.1 Pro Drivers, Any point?

pumaz

pumaz

pumaz

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Not long installed Windows 8.1 Pro and just getting to grips with it and in the process of optimizing.

On installation Windows 8.1 recognized all my hardware and installed all the drivers, I've always been one for downloading latest drivers but it appears there haven't been any updates for my motherboard since 2013 so is there any point?

Bar video drivers I'm tempted to let Windows take care of them, is this wise?
 
I normally tend to do Intel Chipset drivers from the website as afaik they can contain bugfixes and little bits of performance (I believe AHCI support is dependant on them?).
 
I always install manufacturer drivers. Even for wired NICs, in the past I've experienced issues with things like flow control with Microsoft drivers.
 
The only extras I've installed over the standard Win8.1 version drivers are the Motherboard specifics from Asus and AMD/ATI's APU Drivers/Catalyst centre.
 
I normally leave audio as is as (and please don't tell me this is just me) but Realtek's site is an absolutely abhorrent thing to try and navigate around, and the mirrors for the drivers normally come down in KB/s.
 
By not installing Chipset drivers I have suffered BSODs in the past (fixed by installing chipset drivers) so I'd say that one is the most important. Same with Graphics and in some instances LAN and WLAN.

Audio however I generally wouldn't bother, depending on the soundcard i.e. high quality cards, yes, cheap and on-board leave as Windows default, unless issues arise.
 
The Realtek download speed used to be atrocious, but now they'd added more/closer servers some of them are fine. If the download is trickling just try one of the others.

The site is appalling though. Getting the audio drivers is simple enough, but trying to navigate the network drivers requires certification itself.

I don't bother installing the Realtek audio drivers myself, as I have a Xonar DX (ASUS aren't much better in than Creative in that respect) but I do use them quite frequently at work.
 
Tute said:
I normally leave audio as is as (and please don't tell me this is just me) but Realtek's site is an absolutely abhorrent thing to try and navigate around, and the mirrors for the drivers normally come down in KB/s.
Click to expand...

Hehe I know what you mean about Realtek,I've both onboard sound and lan drivers bookmarked at their site for my laptop.
 
After recently doing a fresh install of Windows 8.1 Pro, I suffered almost instantaneous lock-ups after installing the chipset, audio, LAN etc drivers from my motherboard installation disc. Did a fresh re-install to fix the issue and haven't installed any of the above since and I've had no issues, I think Windows sorts out the drivers for these things behind the scenes during the OS install anyway.
 
PhysicsMan94 said:
After recently doing a fresh install of Windows 8.1 Pro, I suffered almost instantaneous lock-ups after installing the chipset, audio, LAN etc drivers from my motherboard installation disc. Did a fresh re-install to fix the issue and haven't installed any of the above since and I've had no issues, I think Windows sorts out the drivers for these things behind the scenes during the OS install anyway.
Click to expand...

Windows may install drivers for all the hardware during install but they certainly won't be up to date or built for performance. My office PC for example had all drivers installed by the Windows 8 installer but the audio driver was awful for clicking and popping and the vga driver for an Nvidia card had no 3d acceleration and would not run any 3d apps. Both sorted with an up to date driver from the manufacturers.
 
I recently did a full reinstall of Win 8.1 on my laptop, first I tried with only windows drivers and it was screwed up in a week, second try with drivers from HP - pretty much the same problem.

Third time lucky, all drivers downloaded from manufacturers websites and not had any problems.

I never trusted windows drivers in the past and understand why.... lol
 
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