ASRock's Motherboards Are Windows® 10 Compatible

Piddeman, thanks for posting your experience with your 970M Pro4 board and Windows 10.

Your board is a new model, introduced in 2015, although uses somewhat older classic AMD chipsets, the 970 and SB950, introduced in 2011.

I only mention this because owners of other boards with Intel chipsets used with their "2nd Generation Intel Core Processors", which were also released in 2011 have been concerned about Windows 10 driver availability. Some of them apparently had some driver issues with Windows 10.

It seems strange IMO that chipsets from AMD and Intel of the same age would seemingly have different levels of support from Windows 10.

I noticed recently that ASRock has Windows 10 drivers included on the download page of one of their Intel P67 boards. That is going pretty far back (relative to Intel), considering the previous generation processors were released beginning in 2008.

Many users with problems blame the mother board manufactures for the lack of drivers. I tend to blame the source of the drivers, Intel, AMD, and the smaller players like ASMedia, RealTek, etc.

Why do we new drivers for Windows 10? Whom is responsible for that?

                                               ATTENTION ATTENTION ATTENTION

For anyone looking for Windows 10 Driver and UEFI/BIOS updates, ASRock has posted a web page with their current list of AMD and Intel mother boards that have been updated for Windows 10.

Find that page here: http://www.asrock.com/microsite/Win10/

So far I don't see any Win 10 drivers on your board's download page yet.

Newer AMD boards are now getting Windows 10 drivers, which might be compatible with your board's chipset.

I'm referring to the AMD "All in one" driver, version 15.20.1060, which I am seeing included with AMD boards with the 990 chipset, 970, and all of the FM2 boards.

The Realtek RTL8111E network chip is used in many ASRock boards. there must be a Win 8.1 driver for that chip that can be used with Win 10 until Realtek provides a Win 10 driver.

Ok, good, assuming you have BIOS/UEFI 2.20 which has the Windows 8 update normally seen for ASRock boards, you should be fine for Windows 10.

There is a Beta BIOS/UEFI, version L2.23A, in the Beta Zone on your board's download page that has additional Win 8 updates. Don't be afraid to apply a Beta BIOS/UEFI update on your board from ASRock, I've used their Beta versions several times and never had any problems. That is, in contrast to another mother board manufacture whose Beta BIOS updates tend to add or fix one thing and remove or break other things...

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Fatal1ty%20Z68%20Professional%20Gen3/?cat=Beta

The BIOS/UEFI update is NOT needed for Windows 8 or 10 to work in general, but for certain features to work correctly. I recommend that this BIOS/UEFI update be applied on your board regardless.

Just do what I wrote above, try drivers, etc, provided for other Intel chipset mother boards. Some of the new Intel driver installation programs will check the chipset generation on the board, and stop the installation if it decides the chipset is not compatible. The range of "incompatible" chipsets tends to be artificially large, some are not included seemingly arbitrarily due to Intel's hyper-conservative nature, or to motivate us to update our PCs. In other cases older chipsets like the pre-PCH North and Southbridge chipset types can be incompatible with new features. Your Z68 board is a single chipset PCH type. Just an FYI in case a driver installation you try does not complete.

ASRock has ten Z68 boards that I can find, so we need to narrow it down better than a "Z68" board before we can determine where you are at with the BIOS version. Meaning the exact model number.

Also, the CPU you are using would be nice to know.