I had to because of a hard drive crash leading to a system rebuild.
With some classes of drivers, especially video, there are significant improvements from one release to the next.
From nVidia
In this case, I play 4 of the 5 games listed.
System drivers don’t get updated all that often and I really only check to see if there are enhancements or fixes I need once a year or so. But for the most part, they fall into the ain’t broke, don’t fix it category.
Probably just because it’s the first thing people are told to do when there’s a problem.
17 dozen boards. Geez.
Do you know the details? Wiring up a bus is hundreds of traces and there’s many, many constraints to keep in mind. (Signal quality, power bypassing, chip-specific requirements.) I know EE, but not how motherboards are put together. I’d be very interested in learning about software so powerful that it could automate all this.
Often times, a computer component manufacture (not just motherboards, but video, CPUs, etc.) can create a new, less expensive model by simply disabling a few features or removing some chips. The assembly line can switch the model it is producing with a flick of a switch. Intel did this all the time. The original Celeron CPUs were just Pentium cores with some of the cache disabled.
Also, when newer version of chipsets arrive, supporting faster CPUs of the same type, or higher memory speeds, the Motherboard may only need minor tweaks to accommodate the new part, but it still needs a unique model number.
Each different version of this one product gets its own model number. That won’t account for all 17 dozen models in this case, but it may explain many of them.
Nothing citeable I’m afraid. It was one of those Learning channel type programs a couple of years back. Basically asking the same question presented here, how do you turn out something that complicated so fast.
Most of those hundreds of traces, or thousands, are fairly standard. Data lines, address lines, clock signals, syncs, etc. The connections and requirements for all of those are part of the definition for the component in the program so autorouting takes care of nearly all of the drudgework.
As an EE you may have been exposed to SPICE, an electronic specific CAD and circuit simulator. The stuff they’ll be using is super-spice on roids. Kind of like the difference between the software you could get to do a 3d animation at home and the stuff they use at Pixar Studios.
Not that I know much about the topic, but I’ve also heard that if some parts of the component fail QC, those parts are disabled and it’s sold as a lesser model.