EVGA To Begin Providing Its Motherboard Drivers On 8GB Flash Drives, Not Discs

From the “It’s about damn time!” files is news from EVGA that the company is going to soon be shipping its motherboard drivers on a… *drum roll*… flash drive. Novel idea, right? In reality, it’s been an idea pretty much everyone has had at some point the past decade, as optical discs have fallen out of favor due to their clunky design, and requirement for a disc drive that’s barely used.

In a Twitter post, company representative Jacob Freeman posted a picture of an EVGA flash drive, which comes in at 8GB. I’d presume that you’re able to easily format the drive afterwards, which would allow you to use it for whatever small data you want to tote around. EVGA could have easily made these drives 4GB or perhaps even smaller, but clearly wants to give a little bit of added value here.

No more driver DVDs in future EVGA motherboards including the new H370. Instead you get the drivers on this small 8GB flash drive ? pic.twitter.com/3ACXv3snFp

— Jacob Freeman (@EVGA_JacobF) May 17, 2018

As far as I’m aware, this makes EVGA the first company to go this route (not counting notebook vendors), and I hope that it’s the beginning of a trend. As someone who juggles around multiple test PCs, and installs brand-new motherboards every once in a while (we have an EVGA in our Coffee Lake rig), the fact that 100% of the boards on-hand here have drivers on an optical disc drives me bonkers. This is much more convenient – you just plug it in.

Now that all said, whether the drivers come on a flash drive of optical disc, chances are good that a company’s support website is going to have more up-to-date drivers, though that’s not always the case with things like Intel’s chipset driver, which doesn’t get constantly updated. It’d be really cool if the software on this drive could download the latest drivers, but in reality, once you are up and running, you could easily go and download those updated drivers yourself, and then store them on the drive.

So… EVGA’s taken care of. What about you other guys? ASUS? MSI? ASRock? GIGABYTE?