hello guys. i have a new motherboard that needs to roll out soon and the drivers are all executables. how should one handle this? i tend to build my images on a vm in hyper-v so i would have to install these drivers when deploying with sccm 2012 r2. should i just create packages for them and install? or extract and try and find each file?

It depends ... can you extract the drivers somehow? This might result in .ini files that can be used. 

some of them extract to cat,inf and sys files. some just don't extract. how would i handle both cases?

Extract the ones that can be extracted and import them in ConfigMgr as you do with every other .inf driver. Use applications or packages for .exe ones. 

For those that don't extract, yes create a package and install that way during the deployment TS.

You should *never* install drivers in your image -- not sure if that's what you meant or not, just stating it to be clear.

if i may ask, where in the mdt integrated task sequence would i put driver packages?

Instead of the default "Auto apply drivers". 

the driver packages that contain the exe's would need to install during the 'install applications' task sequence group, which would occur after the 'setup windows and configuration manager' step

ok great. thanks Kriss. let me try that.

Install the .exe driver onto a reference physical machine, export the driver from the driver store with an application called DoubleDriver.  Then import the driver into SCCM's Driver Library.

That will usually work, but not always as sometimes the exe installers install other things that the drivers depend upon like services or other applications.