SUMMARY
On the MSI website (msi.com/Motherboard/support/MAG-X570-TOMAHAWK-WIFI) the X570 chipset drivers on offer are:
AMD Chipset Driver
Version 2.11.26.106 / Date 2021-02-23 / Size 370 MB
On the AMD website (amd.com/en/support/chipsets/amd-socket-am4/x570) the X570 chipset drivers on offer are:
AMD Chipset Drivers
Revision 2.13.27.501 / Date 2021-02-04 / Size 51 MB
What the heck? The direct-from-AMD drivers are quite a bit smaller, were released earlier and are a more updated version than the MSI equivalents.
My main question about the immediately prior sentence is the SIZE ... 51 MB vs 370 MB. What's up with that? Also, the direct-from-AMD drivers handle all of the following chipsets: B350, A320, X370, X399, B450, X470, X570, B550, A520, TRX40 and WRX80. And yet the direct-from-AMD drivers are much smaller.
Action Plan: I should install the 51 MB direct-from-AMD X570 chipset drivers onto my MSI X570 Tomahawk / Ryzen 5600X / Win10 x64 system, right?
DETAILS
I've been assembling and programming computers for decades, but I guess I'm just a n00b when it comes to installing AMD chipset drivers in the Win10 era.
The system concerned in this post is a bit of a mongrel:
MSI X570 Tomahawk (with 7C84v15 UEFI/BIOS)
AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
NVIDIA GT 710 (system will never play a game/card was cheap and works fine)
Intel Optane 120GB M.2 NVMe boot drive (by/for HP)
MS Windows 10 x64 Pro
The system is up and running. After assembling the hardware I installed Win 10. The OS installation and the Windows Update process provided at least workable drivers for all devices. I configured the software/OS in a way that I consider to be complete. I did not install any drivers or MSI Dragon Center from the CD/DVD that was included in the box with the mobo.
As a final step I went back to check if the drivers were up to date. I really was not expecting the state of affairs I encountered with the drivers.
The X570 chipset drivers that are installed appear to have been written (?munged?) by M$. I guess I could understand why M$ would want to do such a fool thing.
OK. So I should install the "proper" X570 chipset drivers (the direct-from-AMD drivers) from the web page below, right? I don't get why the MSI drivers are so much bigger.
https://www.amd.com/en/support/chipsets/amd-socket-am4/x570
Thanks for reading this!
