chipset / motherboard / PCI drivers

[VirusType2]

hey, I have a retail version of Windows installed on my pre-built PC (not the version of windows that came with the PC), and everything has always seemed to be working fine.

I installed drivers for the basic things like audio and ethernet. I don't remember ever installing chipset drivers or motherboard drivers.


however, after setting a laptop up with a different version of Windows, I realized I had to update things like chipset drivers.

well, so now, I'm like trying to update the chipset drivers for my desktop PC.

the PC is an emachines W3503, and emachines doesn't list chipset drivers or motherboard drivers on their website.

so I have some questions:

-what does a chipset driver cover - the CPU or more?

-is it the same thing or different from a motherboard driver?

-is there also a PCI driver, because I'm having some issues with a PCI card

It looks like for all these things, windows installed a standard driver.


anyway, the reason is that I bought a Creative X-Fi PCI sound card a long time ago, and it doesn't fully work. EAX doesn't work and hardware acceleration in games doesn't work. In fact, I have to lower hardware acceleration in the control panel all the way to zero in order to play games without the sound glitching out.

Creative's response was that it was an issue with my motherboard. maybe they were right. Maybe I need some drivers. Lol.

Any advice or places to look would be great. Google is not giving me good results, and I'm not sure what the hell I'm doing.

 

[Barney Fife]

To make a long answer very short Chipset Drivers are bundle of drivers that actually drive your motherboard and all of her integrated chips, sound and video, buses and bridges, ports and controllers, synchronize.
To better understand the chipset drivers or MB drivers (Same thing) you must read what chipsets are in the hyperlink I have posted above.
The word "Chipset" actually means sets of chips in short. Every hardware in your computer must have a driver; which will make possible for any given hardware to get alone with the others on the same MB.

Good Luck.

 

[VirusType2]

thanks for the help.

I spent about an hour yesterday, and about 45 minutes just now searching but I just can't seem to find the drivers I need.


It's an Emachines W3503 desktop

should I be searching using the model of my motherboard instead?

 

[TechnoHippyChic]

These should be what you need, that model uses an ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset.

 

[VirusType2]

Thanks

oh - chipset drivers are for the on board video? christ I'm looking all over for something I don't even want.


or do I?

I bought a PCIe video card and have been using that.

can I use both? I thought I had to remove the drivers or at least disable the x200.

 

[TechnoHippyChic]

The onboard video connects through the bus that is controlled by the chipset, video drivers are a different thing. You should be ok with it disabled or not, but you still want the drivers for PCI/IDE/SATA/USB etc.

 

[VirusType2]

lol. I haven't had my chipset drivers installed for about 4 years then.

I thought x200 was just a crap video thing with barely enough processing power to work a windows desktop. I didn't realize x200 was the motherboard.

I thought it might be conflicting with the PCI and PCIe video cards I've always had installed, so I removed it.


Great help thanks

 

[Barney Fife]

I believe (And someone correct me if I'm wrong) that genetic MBs (OEM) like EMachine, Dell, HP, Etc, with genetic Chipsets get their drivers from Windows installer as genetic drivers (Universal Drivers) the first time you install Windows. And whenever you're updating Windows, there are also hardware updates. Most likely you won't even need to update genetic OEM MBs, Unless we're talking about premium MB, the ones we buy for building.

Check with Windows Update for any hardware updates, and if there's none then don't worry about it, just update video card driver, unless there's specific problems.

Good Luck.