What Driver to Use

I was given an ASUS ROG Strix G531GT with a GF 1650. I'm new to Nvidia and gaming laptops in general (although this machine will primarily be used for work) so I wonder what driver I should use.

Should I go with:

• drivers for the manufacturer's site (for custom optimizations)
• Nvidia drivers (drivers as the GPU manufacturer intended)
• Windows Update drivers

Also, standard or DCH?!

 

Always drivers from nvidia (or amd when that's applicable)..

The only drivers you should ever use from the manufacturer are for those specific unique devices that don't appear to have a functional driver installed (come up as unknown) or when the windows supplied one isn't doing the trick for those unique devices (like the bluetooth adapter if it's not functioning correctly using the windows supplied driver)

General chipset drivers, graphics drivers, sound drivers and storage drivers are about the only thing most people should need to install. Everything else should be taken care of natively by windows's own driver catalog (since hardware manufacturers are SUPPOSED to be providing WHQL certification after which it should then be dumped onto the catalog).

DCH would make the most practical sense since that will be the way going forward it seems.

Also, i generally recommend doing a "clean install" via the nvidia driver option when doing an install and granted this may be your own preferrence, but i ensure that i select custom install in order to not only do the clean install, but to make sure that geforce experience is unchecked (otherwise it installs). This eliminates a good bit of bloatware and specially for those ultra concerned about telemetry among other things.

 

Thanks Judas. Windows 10 sucked in some drivers from Windows Update the moment I turned Internet on (I thought it wouldn't because I told Windows Update to pause for the next X days, but no), but since he installed a relatively recent DCH driver, with control panel and without GF Experience, I decided to leave it for now.

I have the machine set up, the most complicated part was finding out how to turn off RGB. They have some control software that's only available through Windows Store, but it also requires some services which have to be downloaded from ASUS's site where they are kind of buried (also, I don't think that there is a single package, but rather several different ones for different functionalities).

 

Windows 8.x onward will automatically do device detection and full Plug-n-Play style setup, it's completely separate from windows update. It's generally best to let windows do the drivers initially and then simply get the latest version (as often the ones installed are anywhere from several months through to even several years old) and install do a "clean" install of them via the custom option.

 

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