GA-990XA-UD3 why are the drivers not updated properly...

[stewartb]

Please no binary minded gigabyte fanboi trolls, I am a system builder and repairer.

Why have the motherboard drivers not been updated since 2010/04/12  ?
If I go to the equivalent (chipset) mobo drivers page that ASUS has they are at least from 2012.
Ok, I know of course I can go to AMD's driver page and select '8-series' and download the latest there but it makes ASUS look good which I thought was a hard thing to do being a previous ASUS board buyer.

Now today I see a 'new' Etron usb 3.0 driver for the board (released yesterday) is on the downloads page -

Etron USB 3.0 Driver   1.0.0.104   6.46 MB   2012/05/28

As I installed the last update from the same downloads page with a date of 2012/01/06, I naturally expected that the new driver to be exactly that - new. Alas no the previous version on the gigabyte download page for this mobo was 1.0.0.109 thinking it was lazyness (common) when packing the driver I download it anyway which wouldn't install as it correctly told me I had a newer driver.
So as a result I am now slow downloading (40mins for 11.9MB file) the latest which is 1.0.0.112 from Etron...

And yes there are still outstanding issues with this board although it is a lot more stable than it was, hence new driver updates can and do interest me greatly.  I am left with the sense that Gigabyte don't really care.

[Vezina]

Look on the bright side of things.
Windows 7 by default has the proper drivers for most of the devices and they work.
Sometimes the AMD SATA ones may bring a slight performance increase but some other times may cause you BSOD-s.

As long as you choose the right video card driver and sound card driver you should be ok.
Chipset drivers are not really needed the windows generic ones work fine.

If you download the official AMD drivers you may notice that almost nothing is installed ,except some useless USB filter driver.
Why would they update the package if the older is perfectly fine and identical ?!
 
I am personally disappointed by the rare BIOS updates more than the  lack of drivers updates on my motherboard.

LE:As you can see i own and As.. product ,an audio card .Please take a look at the number of drivers released for it and how many are WHQL.Try the card to see how  useless the control panel is. Worst aquisition i have made in my life.

[stewartb]

Having installed the USB 3.0 drivers from the Etron website I can confirm that all 4 of my USB 3.0 sockets now work, which wasn't the case previously.
I would disagree with regard to windows 7 and motherboard drivers - although sometimes you can get away with the MS efforts it is nearly always preferable to download the chipset manufacturers official drivers, having experienced many different windows 7 set ups I can say that with some insight and certainty.
I do agree that ASUS Xonar cards have poor driver support, as do creative's sound cards. I can also see why vendors don't want to spend $250 per MS os for WHQL testing and to be honest many drivers aren't and work fine.
You could apply similar reasoning to BIOS updates if its working ok why update the bios, in my experience the more bios updates you get per board can be symptomatic of an unstable board, rather than adding features.