What Nvidia driver to use for Windows 10?

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carlmart

Gawd
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Sep 17, 2006
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Last week I decided that things were getting too risky to keep using Windows 7 on my desktop, as my AV program was Windows Defender and it had no more support from MS.

Even if my move to Windows 10 on my laptop, from Windows 8, had been easy and problem-less, things didn't prove to be so with my desktop, a Gigabyte Z97X Gaming 7 MB, intel i7 and Nvidia GeForce GTX1050Ti.

Now I will make a new install, using Windows 10 1909 x64 file, and I wonder what Nvidia driver to download.

If you select your driver by your board you get one driver, which is not that recent. But if you follow the Windows 10 x64 drivers path, you just have to select between Studio or Game option.

So what driver should I choose? What do the Studio and Game choices mean?
 
Creatives, max stability.

"NVIDIA Studio Drivers provide artists, creators and 3D developers the best performance and reliability when working with creative applications. To achieve the highest level of reliability, Studio Drivers undergo extensive testing against multi-app creator workflows and multiple revisions of the top creative applications from Adobe to Autodesk and beyond. "
https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/147971/en-us

Gamers, Max performance and features.

"Game Ready Drivers provide the best possible gaming experience for all major new releases, including Virtual Reality games. Prior to a new title launching, our driver team is working up until the last minute to ensure every performance tweak and bug fix is included for the best gameplay on day-1."

https://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
 
When you install make sure you are disconnected from the internet so Windows won't download drivers automatically for you. Just have everything for your system on a USB drive. Once you have the drivers installed that you want then you can hook back up to the internet.
 
DooKey said:
When you install make sure you are disconnected from the internet so Windows won't download drivers automatically for you. Just have everything for your system on a USB drive. Once you have the drivers installed that you want then you can hook back up to the internet.
Click to expand...
Well, that is exactly the opposite from what I was planning. You see, on my first install there were some issues with the Gigabyte drivers I had available for Windows 10.

One of them, particularly, said this: "This computer does not meet the minimum requirements for installing this software" It was an USB 3 driver, so I wonder what "minimum requirements" those were. So I thought letting Windows to install some drivers wouldn't do much harm. They might be more modern that mine.
 
carlmart said:
Well, that is exactly the opposite from what I was planning. You see, on my first install there were some issues with the Gigabyte drivers I had available for Windows 10.

One of them, particularly, said this: "This computer does not meet the minimum requirements for installing this software" It was an USB 3 driver, so I wonder what "minimum requirements" those were. So I thought letting Windows to install some drivers wouldn't do much harm. They might be more modern that mine.
Click to expand...

I always download my drivers directly from the device manufacturer. MB makers don't keep up too well.
 
How do I get to know the manufacturer for each device? By looking at the Gigabyte drivers disk?
 
Just install the NVidia driver. I'm assuming Windows is asking if it should turn on game mode.

As for first builds of home pc's. I just install windows, connect to internet and let it get fully updated. Drivers, Defender, patches and all. I then pull down 3rd party drivers to update the MS baseline as I feel required. Sound/display and so on. Rarely do you need to supply newer USB/chipset or other "root" drivers.
 
OK. Windows 10 1909 installed. Installing the Nvidia driver was as tricky as it was on the other W10 install I did last week: the screen turns two tones of light blue, the lower half slightly grayish and flickering. It doesn't stop and you have restart to get things fine. Hopefully the driver was installed.

But I have a more serious matter to solve, which also happened on my last install: Windows 10 does not see the other HDDs or SSDs that are plugged on it. They do show in the BIOS setup, so I know they are there, but W10 does not show them, not even in Disk Management.

My guess is it might be a SATA driver issue, but I installed all the drivers I had or could identify.

Can anyone tell me what might be happening and/or what should I do?

BTW: everything was fine with Windows 7 on that.
 
Did you do a clean install or upgrade install?
Are the other drives empty or do they already have stuff on them?
Did you manually assign interrupts or do you have UPnP enabled?
Do the drives have AHCI and UEFI enabled?
What file system(s) are the drives formatted in?
 
Additionally, you can find unknown devices by looking at the hardware ID in Device Manager and checking this: https://pcilookup.com/

The first part is the vendor id. Intel's is 8086 for example. The next part of the hardware ID is the Device ID which shows the specific hardware.

Just in case DooKey's link doesn't resolve it. I'm assuming you've got unidentified hardware in your Device Manager. I always like to make sure I don't have any unknown hardware in there. :)
 
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