Asus A7n266-VM IDE question

[edtrip]

I need help with this board.

The system is 950 tbird (100fsb)
256mb pc 2100 (2 x 128mb)
geforce2 gts
20 gb ata100 hd
Win98
and using the onboard audio

In 'device manager' under Hard disk controllers it lists

Primary IDE controller (single fifo)
Secondary IDE controller (single fifo)
Standard dual PCI IDE controller

First question - Why does it say single fifo instead of dual? Every PC i've set at for a couple years now has said dual fifo. Is it bad to be single?

Second question - Shouldn't my IDE controller be something more specific to Nforce than just a standard controller? My kt333 system has a Via bus master IDE controller.

Something seems wrong here to me but all my searching has not led to an answer yet. And I started by using Asus latest drivers for 98, following their install procedure, then tried the unified nforce package from Nvidia.

And the performance of this board is not great. The video in 3d just seems to degrade over time, in the game, not overheating or locking up, but going from fluid to choppy and stuttering.

I ran this cpu and geforce 2 in an older pc with a kt133a mobo with 256mb ram and the performance, in these same games, was a hell of a lot better than with this nforce board - and a lot more stable.

One other thing - even though i have both Dimm slots filled the boot screen says 64-bit memory. I thought it should be 128.

Any help appreciated, thanks.

 

[batmanuel]

You may have to go down through the device manager and manually update the drivers by right-clicking on the device and going to the driver tab. In Win XP, I've seen some of the NForce driver installation packages occasionally not update the driver to the right version. For instance with the Nvidia UDP, my IDE driver was at first listed as Nforce MCP IDE Driver, but a manual update changed it to the correct, newer MCP2 IDE driver.

This may take care of some of the performance issues, although I've often seen Win 98 computers start to have problems with performance degradation after a few hours of heavy use. It usually is caused by programs and the OS grabbing bits of DOS memory and not releasing the memory after it was done. You can see if this is a problem by checking the System properties in the control panel and seeing if the "System Resources" are dwindling down. If they are, maybe it's time to start thinking about an XP upgrade. Most of the new motherboards are really designed with an NT-based OS in mind, and show sub-par performance in 98.

 

[edtrip]

Thanks, i didn't think of trying the update tab, though i have removed the controller a couple of times and let it re-install, but always the same result.

Yeah i know win98 is growing long in the tooth, but my installations are clean and stable and i don't have issues with it, and i've never had the stabiliity issues with it that so many curse up and down. But yeah, it's days are numbered and driver support is a growing problem, which i really think is about what these Nforce issues come down to.

 

[mechBgon]

The nForce chipset is probably using a standard Microsoft IDE driver, which is fine. Even people running WinXP usually are better off using that option, although they have another option too, an nVidia-specific one. I have about 26 A7N266-VM's, counting two at home and 24 at work, but they all run Windows2000.

The nForce 220D chipset in the A7N266-VM uses a single 64-bit memory controller, unlike the nForce 400-series chipsets (415, 420, 415D, 420D), which have two of them. So that's as it should be... both of your memory modules ride the same 64-bit memory controller.

Regarding performance, I use my A7N266-VM for a bit of gaming, using a GeForce2 GTS-V (slower-clocked GF2 GTS), the onboard audio, 512Mb of RAM and an AthlonXP 1600+ (1.4GHz). Aside from the video card being dog-slow for recent games, it does ok by my standards. Regarding your problems, I suspect one of two things:

1) you could use more memory. My Win2000 system peaks at about 570Mb of memory usage when I run UT2003 Demo, so even with 512Mb I'm running out. :Q And that's just the demo version, using only one map!

2) the onboard audio's EAX processing is putting a hit on performance. If you haven't already, switch to two-channel audio and try your games without EAX enabled.

Interestingly enough, one time I pulled out my GeForce2 GTS-V card to use the onboard video, and forgot to put the GeForce2 GTS-V back in. I actually played UT2003 Demo for quite a while before I realized that I was running on the onboard video at which point the system's lower responsiveness suddenly made sense.

 :light:
:Q <------ mechBgon

Sorry if that's not that much practical help to you.

 

[edtrip]

Thanks for your input mechBgon. That clears up my confusion regarding the 64 bit memory. And the IDE controller too, more or less. Would i even benefit IF I were able to get an Nforce specific IDE controller installed? (Which i have not been able to do.)

If theres anybody out there that reads this with an original Nforce board on Win98, please check your 'device manager' and tell me what your IDE controller says and whether yours says single fifo or dual fifo. Thank you.

As for the audio, I keep the game settings down to standard settings - no EAX. But how do i go about setting the board to two-channel audio? I didn't see any reference to that in the control panel.

 

[edtrip]

Nobody out there has an Nforce running 98?