Solved Is this an OEM driver?

ish4d0w · Sep 20, 2023

Hello!

I'm thinking about updating my GPU driver since it hasn't been updated in 3 years, but Intel's Driver Support Assistant (DSA) is giving me this warning sign. One of you here told me that this warning sign only appears if Intel DSA detects customizations to be present.

Q1. Can you please confirm if this is true? Here is the screen:

Q2. Is there any way to tell what the customization is, ie. what did Intel DSA detect that results in this warning message? I need to be able to decide if I should upgrade or not.

Q3. Should I update if my system works fine? I normally wouldn't care for an old driver but this system is exposed to the internet on public wifi, and windows 11 is constantly changing its driver frameworks, also apps'games expect new drivers too...

Q4. This update would be a DCH driver I suppose. I remember reading an article from Intel saying that I can update OEM drivers and it will preserve customizations and still provide the latest firmware. And essentially this being-locked-to-ancient-drivers thing is no longer the case.
Windows 10: Intel unlocks graphics drivers so you can now bypass OEM customizations
and then there's this , completely the opposite...
Warning: Installing This Graphics Driver From Intel May Overwrite...
and then, there's the warning message in the screenshot, which is a lot more threatening than in the one in the article. In the article it says 'it might remove', and my warning msg says 'it will remove'
The link in my warning message is this , different from the one above.
According to this, my current driver might not be DCH.
Hardware specification is in my BIO. Link to specs here and NotebookCheck

EDIT: it is reading DCH by the Test intel described :

Manufacturer: HUAWEI
Model: NBLB-WAX9N
Processor Name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-10210U CPU @ 1.60GHz
Thank you./

OAT · Sep 20, 2023

Since you have a laptop:
A1: The message you are seeing is to warn you that the manufacturer might have configured the driver to match your device specs.
A2: Those customizations may include all the F keys to increase brightness level to name just one.
A3: Latest is not always best. So no in your case.
A4: Your GPU is recent enough to keep its configuration.
Bottom line, why would you consider updating your display driver if you have no issues and no update have come through Windows update?

Feel free to try it if you want, WU might roll it right back anyway.
OR
Hide the update permanently, as I have done on mine.

hsehestedt · Sep 20, 2023

Intel DSA didn't detect anything

. They display that warning whether your computer has an OEM driver or not as a precaution. I get that message even on a clean install with no driver other than the built-in generic Microsoft driver.

The issue is simply that the OEM will sometimes make some customization to the display driver to support their specific implementation. This is far more common with laptop computers. I'm not entirely sure whether any OEM actually modifies the display driver for motherboards such as those from ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, etc.

As for what they customized exactly, there really is no way to know.

As an example, I have an older laptop. If I install the ASUS provided display driver, everything works flawlessly. If I install the driver downloaded from Intel, then the display will never wake from sleep.

My suggestion:

1) Make sure that you have the latest driver from your OEM available "just in case".

2) Download the Intel driver and try it! You can always uninstall t and install the OEM driver if needed.

My guess would be that if this is a home-built desktop system you are almost guaranteed that it will work fine. On a laptop - maybe

.

Q3: It's up to you. If all is working well, then there is certainly no urgency to upgrade. If you are comfortable with topics such as rolling back your driver, installing / uninstalling drivers, then go for it

.

As for Q4, Intel has flip-flopped on this topic. For a while they were saying that installing their drivers would cause you to lose any OEM customizations. Then they said that installing their driver on top of an OEM driver would preserve the customizations. Now they are back to saying that you may lose your customizations.

Let's bottom line this:

Try it and find out what happens! However, it never hurts to have backups just in case. I have a full system image that gets incremental updates every day so I can easily revert in case of a major failure. I have never had to do a complete reinstall because of a display driver, so this suggestion may be overly cautious, but better err on the side of safety. But, so long as you have the OEM driver available, I would think you should be good because you can always simply go back to it.

TIP: Consider putting your computer details in your profile. It will allow us to have more information and guess less about your system

.