Question What do AMD chipset drivers do and should I install them?

[Faibra]

I have a Ryzen 5 7600X and a Radeon RX 6700 XT. What are chipset drivers and their purpose? Since I have an AMD CPU and AMD GPU, do the chipset drivers affect the GPU, the CPU, or both? Could there be any potential hardware issues if I do download them? If so, is there a way to reverse those issues?

https://imgur.com/UE7QSwd

View: https://imgur.com/UE7QSwd

 

[Unolocogringo]

Install all of those, they are needed to talk to windows.

 

[Math Geek]

the chipset is the B650 or X670 motherboard you bought. it is what determines the features available to the board. those drivers are needed for windows to talk to all the fun stuff you paid for with the mobo.

yes you want to install those drivers!!

 

[hotaru.hino]

If you want an explanation for what these do to the best that I can gather:

• AMD GPIO driver: The GPIO driver is related to this https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/gpio/gpio-driver-support-overview . Basically both the CPU and chipset have general purpose I/O lines that connect miscellaneous peripherals to it. While the specific connected peripherals depends on the motherboard, some of these may be things like PS/2 ports, serial ports, or some low-speed data port.
  • Is this actually needed? I'd say no. High-speed peripheral interfaces like USB or SATA aren't affected.
• AMD GPIO driver (for Promontory). Same thing as above, just for the chipset side.
• AMD PSP drivers: PSP is short for "Platform Security Processor." This is what implements TPM on the CPU itself. While I believe running without the drivers is fine since some amount of base TPM functionality needs to be implemented for Windows 11, using more advanced security features (such as Core Isolation) likely requires the driver to be installed.
• AMD SMBus Driver: SMBus is short for "System Management Bus." SMBus devices are typically those that monitor the PC for things like temperature, power, etc. So not installing these may give you a limited view of these items if you're using something like say HWiNFO to monitor the computer's health
• AMD PPM Provisioning File Driver. This is only useful in Ryzen 9 X3D CPUs. It detects if you're running a game and automatically parks the CPU die that doesn't have the 3D VCache so the game doesn't run on that die since a performance hit will happen if it does.
  • You don't need this driver

In your case, at the bare minimum if you should install the PSP and SMBus driver. Regarding the PSP driver, even if you're not using Windows 11 or the advanced security features, it'll probably get installed anyway through Windows update and you should be using the latest version.