Can missing chipset drivers cause crashing?

Gonna use steps, makes it a bit shorter so hopefully someone will read it  

1. Got a new computer, assembled and installed Windows 8
2. Installed drivers from Asrock's site. Don't boot inbetween, but once installing Intel Management Engine driver comp crashes(don't know if blue screen or not)
3. Refuses to boot to Windows without System Restore. I do it but I'm unsure what installations are there and what not, so don't reinstall them immediately
4. Monitor goes black twice, not warning anything(no high load). When I unplug the DVI and plug it back in, a fan starts to run at high speed(GPU I think). With power-out restart it runs Windows fine again. One blue screen(BAD_POOL_HEADER) as well, nothing special in Event Viewer(Kernel power). I ran Prime95 overnight(~8 hours), didn't crash.
5. Start installing updates one by one, notice it's ASMedia SATA3 driver ver:1.3.8 when installed -> boot that Windows won't boot at all without a System Restore
6. Been running for a few hours with no crashes now, but had some black boxes in Firefox(Facebook chat panel) I wasn't sure where they came from.  

Is it possible that inbetween, those no signals and blue screens were caused by the fact there were no chipset drivers installed to the computer? Just trying to see if it's a hardware error(GPU I guess   ) or what, obviously more testing need to be done(if starts crashing then I'll try with Intel's integrated graphics etc), but mostly trying to ask if my problems could've been caused by that.

Comp:
Intel i5 3570k
Asrock Z77 Pro4-M
Sapphire Radeon HD7870
Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 8GB
Intel 520 180GB SSD
Windows 8
550W XFX Power

Thanks for answers