Z77 Extreme4 drivers

New INF, IME, and other drivers are mainly needed for the new Intel chipsets and newer Windows compatibility. You will see some crossover between Windows versions for some things, which means no changes were needed for those versions.

Driver updates are not always meant for older chipsets like the Z77. As I said above, there is a point where the driver updates are specifically for the new chipsets. That of course happens when those new chipsets are made available.

Most if not all driver and software installation programs provided by Intel check the platform they are being run on, and adapt the result with the appropriate driver files. Other manufactures do the same thing. That you can use new driver installation programs on older platforms is because the installer has some intelligence built into it.

My point is most if not all of the changes in "new" drivers are not meant as improvements for earlier platforms. They are there to accommodate the new features or changes in the new chipset hardware.

You can use drivers identified for use with newer versions of Windows, but they will likely be no different than the older ones when it comes to your hardware. Some users complain that another company provides "new driver versions" for their older hardware. But the result of using those newer installation programs rather than the original ones for their boards is zero difference in what is actually installed.

Some new Intel drivers have features your chipset cannot support. The IRST version 14 drivers that can work with PCIe NVMe SSDs in RAID simply will not work with your board without other updates to the UEFI/BIOS. Other features cannot be made to work.

New drivers are really for new hardware. Use whatever works for you, but realize it is not long before the new drivers do not contain updates that apply to your hardware.