Formatting

rpf

United States2705 Posts

March 29 2008 22:31 GMT

Hm, I have a PC that I built myself (read: my friend did it

), meaning it's not a PC I bought as it is. I bought each part and had a friend throw it together.

But when I format, do I want to use the CDs that came with the hardware to install drivers and such? People always tell me to get the latest drivers, so I wouldn't want to use a year old CD, right?

And when I get drivers from a website, do I want to go to the manufacturer's website, or the parent company's website? For example, the video card I have is an eVGA 8800 GTS. Do I go to NVIDIA's website for the drivers, or to eVGA's website?

And for the motherboard, do I go to Gigabyte's website or Intel's?

Jayson X

Switzerland2431 Posts

March 29 2008 22:49 GMT

Allways go for the latest drivers of course. Just download them before you format your harddrive, put em on a usb stick or external harddrive.

Graphic cards driver can be downloaded directly from nvidia (or ati if you had an ati card). The difference with graphic cards is just how they've been screwed togheter, what type of cooling and how much ram they give em.

Since motherboards use different kinds of setups and chips you download the drivers from the company that put that thing togheter, in your case gigabyte.

blabber

United States4449 Posts

March 29 2008 22:57 GMT

nVidia, Gigabyte

Flying_Llama

Canada419 Posts

March 29 2008 23:18 GMT

Just google for drivers. The 8800 card is from nvidia so the drivers will come from the nvidia website, not the evga.

eg: type "8800gts drivers" in google.

rpf

United States2705 Posts

March 30 2008 00:58 GMT

Aside from the mobo and GPU, are there any drivers I absolutely need? From what I understand, Windows has generic drivers for everything, but that things work better using drivers specifically geared towards your hardware. I mean, my Reclusa wouldn't be much more than a typical keyboard if I didn't install the applicable drivers.

/I don't know too much about computers beyond how to run a program. ^_^!

The_Yango

United States16 Posts

March 30 2008 04:19 GMT

On March 30 2008 09:58 rpf wrote:
Aside from the mobo and GPU, are there any drivers I absolutely need? From what I understand, Windows has generic drivers for everything, but that things work better using drivers specifically geared towards your hardware. I mean, my Reclusa wouldn't be much more than a typical keyboard if I didn't install the applicable drivers.

Off the top of my head:
Mouse, Keyboard, Network Card, Sound Card

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