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Drivers: what, from where, and in what order

Driver installation order matters, and most problems after a fresh install come from ignoring it.

1 min readBeginner20 minUpdated August 1, 2026
  1. Step 1 of 1

    The right order

    20 min

    Start with the chipset driver from the motherboard manufacturer. It is what tells Windows what the rest of the board even is, so installing anything before it tends to leave devices with a yellow warning icon in Device Manager.

    On AMD boards the chipset driver also installs the correct CPU power plan. Without it Ryzen processors perform noticeably worse, because Windows does not know how to schedule across their cores.

    Second comes the graphics driver, downloaded directly from NVIDIA or AMD rather than from the card vendor. During installation choose the clean install option, which removes previous versions.

    Only then the rest: networking, audio, Bluetooth, USB controllers. Windows Update has usually installed these already and there is nothing to do — check Device Manager and deal only with anything showing a warning.

    Do not update drivers afterwards without a reason. "If it works, leave it" holds unusually well here; the exception is the graphics driver, which is worth refreshing for new games.

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    From an empty USB stick to a working system: preparing the media, BIOS settings, partitioning, working around the Microsoft account, and the first tidy-up afterwards.

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