Motherboard drivers

You have to individually download them after you have picked the motherboard model. BUT you only need it for your operating system!

To be more specific, you just need, from ASUS:

Sound, LAN, their APIC chip and whatever is unique to your card that the device manager says the drivers are not already loaded.

The video drivers you should get form either AMD or Nvidia if discrete cards are used. Get the Intel chipset drivers directly from Intel.

Normally the motherboard manufacturers give you a disc that has them on it. I just purchased a new Asus motherboard and mine came with one.

Absolutely. BUT the online stuff is usually newer. Who knows how many "prints" of the CDs the manufacturers actually do. BUT keep this CD and don't lose it. It may also be able to recover your BIOS should you need it.

Yeah I want to get the latest and greatest drivers from asus. Not the ones on the disk. I want to get all the drivers to maximize my motherboard. So I actually need o download and install all 42 drivers separately.

ASUS doesn't have the latest on the Intel Chipsets, get that directly from Intel instead (based on my experience).

For sound, LAN, get them from ASUS unless you know where else to get even newer ones. But these ones do not affect performance that much anyway.

You should use the drivers and utilities on the install CD then you update those ones.

The motherboard Cd also has the shipsets applicable to your motherboard like Via or Intel.

With the install CD drivers, you can then see whether you actually need to download drivers, you may find the PC runs smoothly without updates.

Updates sometimes are not always the best and may cause more harm than good so by setting a Restore Point, you can at least go back to the point before the update and, also, you can "go back" to a previous install if the update is giving issues.

Actually you don't. The drivers on the disk will get your system up and running. You can then update the drivers that need to be updated if at all. You are making yourself more work then necessary but whatever you want. Secondly the latest and greatest drivers aren't always the best. This is the reason they always say not to update your bios if you are not having problems or need the update for a hardware issue. It can cause more issues then what it fixes or brick your system.