How to Install Motherboard Drivers

This article includes instructions for installing motherboard drivers, including how to determine which drivers you need and how to find and download the drivers.

Determine What Motherboard Drivers You Need

Understanding how to install motherboard drivers is important for several reasons. You might be building a new PC, upgrading your existing PC, or want to ensure your computer is running the latest device drivers.

The motherboard in your computer is unique to the make and model of your computer. For this reason, the only way to know which exact drivers you need is to determine the brand and model number of the motherboard inside your computer.

1. Select the Start menu and type System. Select the System Information app.

2. Select System Summary from the tree in the left pane. Look for the three pieces of information in the right pane that start with BaseBoard. This includes the Manufacturer, Product code, and Version of your motherboard. Note these for later.

3. If you are only interested in installing motherboard drivers for specific components, select Components from the tree in the left pane. You can select components like Sound Device or Display to see driver information for those devices. Look for Driver in the Item field. The information in the Value field contains the path and name of the driver file.

   The Name and Manufacturer fields will provide you with which company manufactured the component. With this information and the name of the driver file, you can locate the latest driver on the manufacturer's website. Alternatively, you could install and run third-party driver updater tools to handle the process for you.

Find and Download Driver Files

You can download and install all the latest drivers for your motherboard, or just individual ones, by visiting the manufacturer's website for your motherboard.

1. Every motherboard manufacturer website typically has an area dedicated to drivers. You can usually find this by searching the site for "drivers" or finding a link to the driver section.

2. You can either search by the driver model number you obtained in the System Information window, the computer model, or the service code printed on your computer on the driver search page.

3. On the search results page, you'll see a list of drivers. However, in some cases, the site may have an option to scan your computer to determine which drivers are out of date.

4. If there is a driver search page and you want to update specific motherboard drivers rather than all of them, you can usually use the name of the driver file you obtained from the System Information window to find the driver.

5. Once you've found the motherboard driver you want to update on your system, select the Download button next to that file.

6. Find where the driver file was downloaded. This is typically an EXE file; in which case you can open it. Or it could be a ZIP file, which you can extract the driver files from (see below).

7. The executable file is typically a wizard which will step through the driver installation process automatically, usually with little interaction required from you. For this option, select Install. If you are worried about other software getting installed or want to handle the install manually, select Extract.

   Selecting Extract is the same as extracting driver files if you've downloaded a ZIP file from your manufacturer's website. The rest of the steps will be the same.

8. Choose a location to save the extracted driver files and select OK.

9. Go to the folder where you extracted the driver files. You should see an EXE file there. Right-click it and select Run as Administrator.

10. This will launch the driver installation wizard. Since the driver is already installed on your computer, you'll see several installation options. Choosing either Modify or Repair will update the driver on your system.

11. Once the motherboard driver update is done, you'll see a Finish button to move to the last step.

12. You'll see an option to restart your computer. You select this as soon as possible, so the changes take effect. Select Finish to restart your computer.