Proper way to upgrade my X79 Extreme 9 to windows 8

[funpilot]

On the Downloads page of this motherboard there are numerous files to download. Could you please tell me how I do each one these and is there a proper order besides doing the oldest first? Which ones should I NOT do now? Also, do I put these all on one USB drive or do I need a separate USB drive for each one? I have never done this before so need your guidance.

[aridhiou1]

I checked the Asrock website and I did not find any duplicate drivers for Win8 64. It looks like the most recent driver version for for each of the functions was uploaded there. Example CIR receiver driver ver:2.5.1003, Game Blaster audio driver ver:6.0.101.0038 and so on.

What I would recommend you is to first install Windows 8 and then check to see if there are any unrecognized entries (HW) in the device manager. You can identify them easily because they have a yellow question mark next to the name. If you have any, you can then download the driver from the website and that's it.


P.S. I guess that you already know that you can use the old Windows 7 tool to make a bootable USB drive for Win8 as well, right? I'm saying this because I saw a couple of dudes asking this around here a week ago.

Good luck! :)

[parsec]

Windows 8 provides many more drivers than Windows 7, I only had to load a few platform required drivers and software, platform meaning an Intel or AMD system.

You need to decide which features on the board you actually will use, if you don't use something why install its software? You can always do that later. If you want to have every last feature active, then you'll need any driver that Windows 8 does not provide. For example, I did not need to install the Intel USB 3.0 driver, Windows 8 had it or automatically installed it.

You can copy as many driver and software files to one USB drive as you like, no need for separate drives. The installation will be faster if you copy the drivers and software from the USB drive to your OS drive, mainly those that must be extracted from zip files. A few installation programs do not like being run from a USB drive, another reason to copy them (temporarily) to the OS drive. Or you can save them to another drive.

Regarding the order of installation, I don't get what you mean by "oldest first". There are only a few things that are best installed first, and really only one that should be first:

First, INF driver ver:9.3.1.1007, the chipset INF files. Those will identify the hardware on the board correctly to all other drivers and programs.

Second, Intel Management Engine driver ver:8.1.10.1286, other known as IME. Among other things, this will enable many of the Intel specific features on the board. On some platforms, certain features will not function until IME is installed.

I'm not using the Broadcom onboard NIC, which your board has, so I don't know if Windows 8 has a driver for it. If it doesn't, you'll have no Internet access until it is installed. That is the Broadcom Lan driver ver:15.4.4.1. That should be done before the Broadcom Teaming driver ver:15.4.4.1, for combing the two NIC chips on your board.

After those two or three, any order is not necessary, besides one or two software only features that may have certain setup requirements.

I like to install the Intel SATA driver next, on your board either Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver and utility ver:11.7.0.1013, or Intel Rapid Storage Technology enterprise driver and utility ver:3.5.0.1101

You probably won't need to install your graphics driver, as it will be done automatically, but it's just convenient to do it at this point.

[funpilot]

Thanks for the great responses. I have the Win 8 Pro CD as I ordered it for my laptop upgrade that went off without a hitch. Some of the other postings seem to hint that doing it from a CD works best. Is that the case?

[wazza300]

cd is easier imo,windows 8 installs all the drivers needed for you,you can access the internet ect once install has completed,then update to the latest motherboard drivers off asrock but its not essential