Drivers, what are they and what do they do, and which ones are necessary?

[YAIBA]

Alright, I’m new to this whole pc building, after I watched some YouTube vids, I heard them keep on saying Nvidia drivers, mobo drivers, and such. What are they? I know they’re necessary, but what do they do? Which parts of my pc needs drivers, and can you provide links? Thanks.

 

System build:

Intel i7 8700

Evga superclocked 1070

Corsair 80+ 750 watt fully modular psu

asus z370 prime a

g.skill rgb 16gb

samsung 970 evo m.2

2tb hard drive 

fractal design meshify c

acer or Asus idk 4K monitor (for the future)

razer blackwidow chroma v2

Logitech g502 proteus core

[Crunchy Dragon]

Drivers provide connection for your hardware to your software such as your Operating System, or games and apps.

 

Most people only worry about GPU and mainboard drivers.

[YAIBA]

16 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Drivers provide connection for your hardware to your software such as your Operating System, or games and apps.

 

Most people only worry about GPU and mainboard drivers.

Oh, well I might have overthought this

[Mira Yurizaki]

Drivers are a way for the operating system, if there is one, to know how to talk to the hardware. This can either be in the form of a separate library or program that the operating system loads in and runs, or part of the operating system itself.

 

Most modern, full fledged operating systems like Windows, macOS, and Linux (well, depending on the distribution) have what are called generic drivers that don't require drivers from the hardware vendor. For example, it used to be in earlier versions of Windows XP and before, you had to load in a SATA driver before installing the operating system because back in those days, SATA wasn't really a thing so the OS didn't include one. But in later versions of Windows XP and after it came with one by default, so you didn't have to do that.

 

What I feel are the absolute minimum for Windows to run on are:

• Motherboard chipset drivers
• Video card drivers
• If needed, Ethernet or Wi-Fi drivers

Windows has a default driver for most of the other hardware (assuming this is the latest version of Windows) that performs just fine. If Windows detects hardware that it doesn't have a driver for, Windows Update will usually pull one anyway from Microsoft.

 

Now the thing with updating drivers is I don't feel it's really necessary. The exception I give is to video cards, but the only thing updating video card drivers do in that regard is tweaking the performance for the better with more recent games. There might be the occasional driver release that fixes or avoids a bug, but those are rare. This is just my general rule but this is how I go about updating drivers:

• I don't touch anything other than the video card's after installing the whatever version I did when I installed the OS
• The video card drivers I don't update unless a game I'm playing is on the list of improvements in the driver notes or if my current version is a few months old (just to keep it up to date)

The reason I don't touch my drivers often: these build the foundation of how my PC behaves. If the PC is working fine, then "don't fix what isn't broke"

[Paddi01]

9 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

If the PC is working fine, then "don't fix what isn't broke"

That's pretty much it, but what about audio?

[Crunchy Dragon]

2 hours ago, Paddi01 said:

That's pretty much it, but what about audio?

I only do things with my audio drivers when I need to. For example, if I just built a new rig and the Windows generic audio driver isn't working.

[LogicalDrm]

Windows 10 should install all latest drivers automatically. If it doesn't, or you are oldskool user like I, you can download latest drivers from manufacturers support pages. Don't use included CD unless you don't have other options. For mobo place is https://www.asus.com/fi/Motherboards/PRIME-Z370-A/HelpDesk_Download/ (or whatever localization it gives :D). Chipset and LAN are the important ones, Audio if you use motherboard for it, SATA if you fancy it (its only to make HDDs bit faster, but nessessary). For GPU you get latest from Nvidia's site. For keyboard and mouse from their support sites. KB and mouse only need drivers if you want to use their special features like light controls or macro keys. Besides them, some monitors have utilities for extra stuff, game controllers, printers etc.

 

17 hours ago, Paddi01 said:

That's pretty much it, but what about audio?

 

That mandate works with all drivers. I for one only have drivers even installed because of mic. My audio goes through external DAC.