New P5K Build Question W7/64/

[epu]

Building another P5K System. Should I install the GRAPHICS DRIVERS that came with my Radeon X1650 (ATI), or just use the standard Windows driver?

[sunburst79]

Harold

I would download and install the latest AMD/ATI driver set for the card. The manufacturers supplied ones are usually out of date and bloated.

Same for the chipset drivers. You might want to install the chipset drivers from the CD as detailed below then update to the latest Intel drivers after rebooting.

Your usually better off inserting the CD into the optical drive and then installing the drivers from the "Update Driver" function in Device Manager rather than running the installer from the disk. It may take several minutes and may not work for each device but its the simplest way of installing the drivers with the least amount of crap. It's not going to work for the video drivers though

If I recall correctly the one thing you dont want to do is install a ASUS driver called "Six Engine" for the ATK110 driver. The Six Engine driver was the one that enabled the EPU (the enhanced power handling state) feature of the chipset. This was under XP but probably holds true in Win7 as well. With Win7 you should find the ATK110 driver at Windows update. If the chipset drivers install fine except for ATK110 then just head over to Windows Update and it should install it for you. This was with newer Intel builds-the P5K may very well have the ATK110 driver built into Win7. The ATK110 driver is apparently written and supplied by each board manufacterer not Intel

Hope that helps

Have a nice holiday.

[epu]

Thank you very much Sunburst for your information. I ran Windows update and didn't check if this was one of the updates. If it were installed, could I just uninstall that update, or would I have to restore a clean Win 7 image? Happy holidays to you also.

[sunburst79]

Originally Posted by epu

Thank you very much Sunburst for your information. I ran Windows update and didn't check if this was one of the updates. If it were installed, could I just uninstall that update, or would I have to restore a clean Win 7 image? Happy holidays to you also.

Unless its showing as being uninstalled in Device Manager leave it alone

It may be listed as an optional hardware update at Windows Update so it's not going to show unless you click the "Custom" update button instead of "Express"

Please keep in mind that I have done a hundred or so Windows installs over the last couple years testing stuff. Its 6AM and stuff I did a year and a half ago gets a little blurry. I'm fairly certain that the last time I installed Win7 on a P45/P35 chipset that pretty much all the drivers were included in Windows7. This was true even for the i7 stuff which was new when Win7 was RTM. So the than the video drivers you should be good to go.