MS or AMD drivers for 850 EVO?

[jhansman]

Just cloned my older SSD to this drive and noticed that Device Mgr. shows a Microsoft driver for the AHCI contoller has a date of 10/2006. This drive is running on a mobo with an 890FX chipset, and a Radeon HD 7700 vid card, on Win10. I updated the Catalyst drivers and figured the chipset drivers would be updated as well, but it appears that at least the controller drivers are still stock MS. The drive is performing well, but I don't really know if my setup calls for a driver update, or if this drive can do better (can't post an attachment of the AS SSD benchmark, but the read and write scores are 3555 and 6048, respectively. Any advice is most welcome.

 

[Joepublic2]

What southbridge? I've always had high CPU usage and ran into some show stopping bugs (bluescreen on boot) with certain boards when using newer versions of AMD's southbridge drivers (14.x) with their older 6XX and 7XX series southbridges.

https://community.amd.com/thread/170979

 

[Elixer]

I haven't had any issues with AMD's drivers for years...
That said, I only update drivers when I have issues, so I haven't updated it past 1.3.1.245 release.
The biggest plus with AMD's drivers is, you can hotplug devices, and that isn't available with the MS ones.

 

[jhansman]

What southbridge? I've always had high CPU usage and ran into some show stopping bugs (bluescreen on boot) with certain boards when using newer versions of AMD's southbridge drivers (14.x) with their older 6XX and 7XX series southbridges.

https://community.amd.com/thread/170979

Southbridge is SB850. I'm not looking to fix something that ain't broke, just wondering if AMD's drivers can squeeze more performance out of my SSDs.

 

[coercitiv]

Southbridge is SB850. I'm not looking to fix something that ain't broke, just wondering if AMD's drivers can squeeze more performance out of my SSDs.

You might have to test that yourself. All I can tell you is I did notice some improvement (in benchmarks) when going from MS to Intel driver with a 850 Pro. However, apples and oranges...

The drivers went through some amount of Win 10 validation though, multiple readme files in the driver package mention "Windows 10 support". Don't use Rapid Mode when doing the transition.

Oh, and whatever you may squeeze in terms of performance... it will matter for benchmarks only

 

[mikeymikec]

I probably would go for AMD's drivers, but after installing them, check Task Manager to find out whether 'system interrupts' is using excessive processor time (it ought to be about 1% when the system is doing moderate to heavy disk I/O, but 'excessive' was about 10-30% with an Athlon II X2). I saw this on an SB750 system with the omega drivers.

I've had a number of experiences since 2009 on a number of systems (SB7xx and SB8xx) with AMD's storage drivers that makes me very reticent to trust them again.

On the previous board I used (SB850), I experienced marginally better performance with AMD's drivers.

 

[jhansman]

Oddly enough, my DM only shows updated AMD video drivers, no AHCI drives installed. I will try those linked above (the page for them lists he controller drivers among those in the package) after creating a restore point. Thanks to all for the info?

 

[mikeymikec]

Maybe the AHCI drivers don't apply to your OS?

What if you do a custom install, are they listed then?