Hardware Drivers.. Where do I start.

[darklink801]

Hello Gbatemp!

I have had a a personally build gaming rig for about 1 and a half year now. And I recently updated it to windows 8.1. I probably shouldn't have because I don't know shit about any drivers.

I got the sound and graphics driver in place and the most basic things but the drivers for my motherbord and Intel I5 2500k don't seem to even try to install themselves.

could anyone instruct me which drivers I would need with a clean install for this setup? :

Spoiler

Operating System
Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit
CPU
Intel Core i5 2500K @ 3.30GHz 45 °C
Sandy Bridge 32nm Technology
RAM
8,00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 668MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. P8H67-M PRO (LGA1155) 29 °C
Graphics
SyncMaster (1920x1080@60Hz)
Standard Monitor (1024x768@60Hz)
1023MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 (ASUStek Computer Inc) 54 °C
Storage
465GB Western Digital WDC WD5000BPVT-55HXZT3 ATA Device (SATA) 27 °C
931GB SAMSUNG HN-M101MBB ATA Device (SATA) 28 °C
Optical Drives
No optical disk drives detected
Audio
Realtek High Definition Audio

 

[GamerzHell9137]

Drivers for mobo and CPU...?
Why do you need these?
Idk any CPU/Mobo drivers out there... only the GPU and Sound have drivers and sometimes LAN.

 

[darklink801]

Since the VGA input in my motherboard doesn't send out a signal to the screen connected to it. I figured that would be the solution..

 

[Xexyz]

What is your motherboard?

 

[darklink801]

"Motherboard
ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. P8H67-M PRO (LGA1155) 29 °C"

 

[FAST6191]

The glib response to such a question is make sure you have a network driver (kind of hard to get on the internet without it).

I am half surprised 8.1 does not have your drivers but hey. If you have a gaming rig you probably want to use something other than the basic and tested things MS puts up on their driver servers anyway.

Anyway 5 main sorts of drivers for your average home computer, business/enterprise server stuff changes things a tiny bit but hey.
Graphics. For gaming I would say always get the drivers for your card/graphics chips rather than rely on windows to provide.
Sound. It will probably be something basic as most sound drivers became standardised some time back (Realtek and Soundmax being the consumer stuff, you can still get big boy audio elsewhere). If you are using HDMI you may have sound from your graphics card instead.
Motherboard/"chipset". Everything will probably speak to each other fine as it is but this will allow them to do it properly.
Network. Modern computers without networking are not so fun I find.
Monitor. Such things are nice as they make sure your monitor has access to all the modes, colour settings and features it might have. That said they are not all that necessary.

After this you have any extras you might have (multi card readers, expansion cards, DVD drives), hard drives (back in server world this is big, this is more if you have SSD drives or are doing a fancy RAID setup), BIOS updates and whatever else.

Anyway most of this revolves around your motherboard
https://www.asus.com/support/Download/1/39/P8H67M_PRO/41/

For the most part stick with the motherboard vendor for drivers unless you have a good reason not to. For graphics always go to Nvidia or Ati/AMD depending upon which made your graphics chips- do not go to the vendor that put the chip on your graphics card, slim exception if you have a really old card or a laptop as those can sometimes benefit from hacked drivers. If Intel made your graphics (and they have onboard options) you probably want a proper graphics card anyway (intel are OK but not really gaming grade).
You say it did not boot from the onboard graphics. If you have a graphics card in there it will tend not to and you might have to select the option in BIOS or remove the graphics card.
Anyway graphics
http://www.geforce.co.uk/drivers/results/70214 is the current stable one for your graphics card.

http://www.geforce.co.uk/drivers/results/71183 is the beta though most of it seems to be for the Shield device and some tweaks for Assassin's Creed 4 if you have two graphics cards.