Hey all, I have an ASUS P8Z68-V-LE motherboard, and I’m thinking that the latest AHCI driver listed there (from June 2011) is really out of date. I’m wondering if this one would be the right one for my board, straight from Intel (of course Intel only lists compatibility for Intel-branded boards at this site):
What does “6-series” mean?
Why not get the driver from ASUS?
6-series = sandy bridge
the drivers from intel are always newer and preferable. taiwanese mobo drivers are always outdated.
except for some weird one-off in-house bullshit features by asus that never survice a generation and are poorly supported by their drivers, it’s always best to go with the oem drivers. very rarely are the hardware solutions tweaked so much that oem drivers don’t work.
that’s why for drivers i always go direct from jmicron, marvell etc for raid/esata, renasus (nec?) for usb3, intel for chipset and realtek for sound drivers.
Because, as I implied but perhaps didn’t make clear, the driver on ASUS’s site is from June 2011, and I’m pretty sure that Intel has come up with something better than that since.
So those ones on the page I linked to should be all right for this motherboard, right?
6-series is the general product designation for the P67, H67, Q67, Z68 chipsets for LGA 1155 processors. Those were originally built for Sandy Bridge CPUs, but most will also run Ivy Bridge processors. They were superseded by the 7 series, including Z77/75, H77, etc.
Those are the drivers you want, though IIRC, Windows 7 already supports AHCI out of the box.