[SOLVED] Windows or (Old) Mobo Chipset Drivers for Z77 (Ivy Bridge)?

[FridayBroadsword]

So I've recently had to reinstall Windows on my ageing (gracefully, I might add) Z77 Ivy Bridge build from 2012, and went into it thinking I wasn't going to be installing any drivers from the mobo manufacturer simply based on the fact that they're all from 2013 and most aren't Windows 10 compatible.

I've reinstalled and everything is working fine, but I did take a quick look and noticed the chipset drivers (Intel Management Engine Interface & Intel INF) were updated for Windows 10 and released back in 2015. Would it be better to install these chipset drivers, or assume the ones that have come with the new Windows installation will be far more current and better?

Could any issues arise from installing the old chipset drivers (incompatibility with current build of Windows etc, causing any issues with things already installed) that I can't rollback or fix? I don't want to screw up this fresh installation already!

The only thing I've noticed is drive read/write speeds seem to struggle a hell of a lot when reading or writing lots of small files across drives, although I'm not sure if this was the case before my reinstall as well as it's only now that I'm transferring backups back across to my drives that I'm doing so much reading/writing in one go.

Build:
CPU: Intel i7 3770k
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-Z77MX-D3H
RAM: Kingston HyperX 16GB Quad Channel 1600MHz DDR3
GPU: EVGA GeForce 1070 FTW
Storage: 1x Samsung EVO 850 Pro 512GB (Boot), 1x Samsung EVO 850 EVO 128GB, 1x WD Black 2TB, 1x Toshiba P300 2TB
OS: Win 10 64bit Build 20.04

 

[geofelt]

If all is working well, I would not be inclined to try to fix something that is not broken.

It is normal to slow down when doing a lot of writes to a ssd.
Once you fill up whatever cache you have, the underlying nand blocks have to be written to and that is slow,

 

[FridayBroadsword]

If all is working well, I would not be inclined to try to fix something that is not broken.

Ok sounds good, do you know if there's any way to check what chipset driver I'm running and its release date? Since I'm just using whatever came with the Windows installation, I'd be interested to know

It is normal to slow down when doing a lot of writes to a ssd.
Once you fill up whatever cache you have, the underlying nand blocks have to be written to and that is slow,

Ok that's good to know and explains what I was seeing

 

[Colif]

Win 10 would likely not allow you to install drivers from 2013.

Ok sounds good, do you know if there's any way to check what chipset driver I'm running and its release date? Since I'm just using whatever came with the Windows installation, I'd be interested to know

You can download and run Driverview - http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/driverview.html

All it does is looks at drivers installed; it won't install any

When you run it, go into view tab and set it to hide all Microsoft drivers, will make list shorter.

if you lucky it has a creation date, otherwise you will need to look for the driver number in Google, its what I do.