Need help with Chipset and AHCI drivers.

[Fphi]

Im using a gigabyte ga-970a-ud3 rev. 1.0 on Windows 7 x64.  I have a habit of always making sure my drivers are up to date.  I'm downloading the AMD Chipset Driver from this page.  When i open the folder I see this.  When I run setup.exe all I see is the AMD USB Filter Driver.  Are those the chipset drivers?  I can't seem to get a clear answer as to what chipset drivers do, or if they are even necessary.  There's also these folders which I assume are more drivers for stuff?  I'm assuming the SB7xx and SB8xx are south bridge drivers, but my Southbridge is SB950, so those shouldn't apply at all.  Why are any of these drivers even here?

As for the AHCI drivers, for Windows 7  x64 when I download them there's 4 folders: LH, LH64A, W7, and W764A.  The included Readme's don't really help as all 4 of them have drivers compatible with Windows 7 x64.  Which one do I download?

I may get Windows 8 very soon, so I checked out the AHCI folder for that, and there's 2 folders with no readmes: AHCI_w7 and AHCI_w8.  Which one do I download?

This is all very frustrating because the rest of the downloads (usb 3, bios, lan, etc) all have only one file and it's clear what needs to be downloaded.  Why do the Chipset and AHCI drivers come with multiple files with no indication of which one is the right one?

[Tiger]

I usually use the drivers from AMD instead of Gigabyte. I imagine both are similar.

LH64A - Note: The LH/LH64A folder contains the driver for Windows Vista 32-bit/64-bit

The AMD SB850 and SB950 are essentially the same, so you should use the SB8xx which is the correct folder for you.

W764A is the folder you should point the Windows 7 64-bit installer to when adding drivers to the Windows 7 installation.

I run the AMD chipset driver setup from AMD after installing Windows.

[Fphi]

I've tried downloading the chipset drivers from here but when the manager starts, nothing called chipset or ahci or anything shows up in the list.  I don't get why information on installing chipset and AHCI drivers is so cryptic.

[rinkol]

For some reason the AHCI drivers are hidden in the chipset driver download. Look under C:\AMD\Support\14-4-win7-win8-win8.1-32-64-sb\Packages\Drivers\SBDrv\hseries\AHCI. Don't ask me why it is under hseries. You should be able to install from the device manager: find the AMD SATA controller, right click and click on "Update driver" and find the aforementioned folder.

Note that some of the older SB750 motherboards require a registry hack to work with the newer AHCI drivers.

[dmdilks]

If you installed windows with using AHCI there really no driver updates. It is a Microsoft / AHCI thing that is why there is no update on the web site.

Microsoft controls that driver when you are using AHCI. Plus I'm not telling any body how to install updates or run they computer.

But yes it is nice we have those updates, but there are really there for people that are having a problems with hardware.

Like I said before that is up to the person and there computer. Plus don't worry yourself over the AHCI driver you will be fine with what you have.

[Vezina]

AHCI drivers are available on Gigabyte website ,which are usually very old or via AMD Catalyst driver packages.
Until some months ago one could download a southbridge driver from AMD as along the video ones achipset packages were being released.

The latest Catalyst 14.4 beta (video driver suite) had and has(it s still available on AMD website) an AHCI driver included ,driver that was removed from the 14.4 final version after 2 updates to the final package.It was the same in both.
It was quite ok with my AM3+ and FM2 Gigabyte boards.
Depending on the BIOS(AHCI module) or HDD it can give more problems though than the Microsoft one , that seems to have trim support as well.

Sometimes they deliver instability or strange problems with some configurations .most reliable being the Microsoft ones ,no doubt about it .

There is no need for chipset drivers with AMD under Windows .The ones AMD is delivering are mostly null drivers to avoid yellow bangs in Device Manager.
With FM 2 you additionally install USB 3.0 ,the useless USB 2.0 filter (available for AM2/3 too ) and the AHCI driver.
This is all and excepting  the FM2 USB 3.0 AMD driver AMD boards need no additional chipset drivers.
 

[dmdilks]

If it's not broken, fix it until it is! That is 100% true. That is what I basically telling him on the AHCI driver. Some things you don't mess with. Plus I say all the time is "Don't fix what isn't broke"