Intel Drivers or Dell Drivers?

I just reimaged my M4600 and I noticed that the Dell driver for the N6300 is quite a bit older than the driver on the Intel download site. I also noticed that Intel finally has a driver for the OEM Intel_825xx Gigabit LAN interface.

Is there any reason NOT to use the Intel drivers?

 

Use the latest driver, in most cases this will be the Intel one. I've never had any problems with using Intel vs. OEM.

 

I went with the Intel drivers. Windows update also installed a LAN driver which was newer than the Dell driver, but not as new as the intel driver.

 

Generally speaking, OEM drivers often have some additional functionality that you won't find with generic drivers (ie. video driver that has backlight controls linked to the BIOS). Unless the OEM driver is very old, buggy, or otherwise affects performance, it would be better to stick to OEM.

 

I always go with the latest drivers, and have only ran into an issue where features were missing without the Dell Trackpad drivers.

 

For the AMD/ATI FirePro, AMD does not offer drivers so no choice, even though the OEM driver is months old and the vbios is over a year old. If there was a driver from AMD, I would try it.

The OEM driver for the Ultimate-N 6300 is V14.0 and the Intel driver is V14.3. The Intel driver provides faster and more reliable wireless connections.

There aren't any issues with the OEM driver for the LAN, but I figured, why not use all Intel drivers, since they seem to come out regularly with updates whereas Dell seems to do as little as possible.