Asus A7N8X system and Drivers....

[rtcpenguin]

Im building a system with the following specs, and I have some questions about it.

Asus A7N8X Deluxe mobo
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton)
2 x 512 PC2700 DDR Crucial
ATI Radeon 9500 Pro (Sapphire)
Western Digital 80MB Special Ed.
Lite-On 52x CD-RW
Lite-On 16x DVD Rom
Samsung Floppy
MS Keyboard
MS Intellimouse Explorer
Windows XP Pro

I was wondering if I'll encounter any problems with these components, namely with drivers. Are there mobo specific drivers for certain components I should install? Should I install the drivers off the Video Card's cd? What about the CD-RW/DVD-Rom? Will Windows XP automatically install the drivers?

Also, a friend of mine built a similar system, and told me he had problems with the FSB speed, and had to manually clock it up to 166, since it didnt autodetect. Is this normal?

Thanks in advance, rtc......

 

[Mday]

after installing xp, you will need the CD that comes with the motherboard. it's painless. after the subsequent reboots, go to nvidia's site and download the latest version of the nforce drivers for xp. the motherboard will clock the cpu at the default settings. you can set the fsb higher, but the barton does 166 anyway. also, it depends on what revision you get.

 

[Lord Evermore]

The motherboard uses a jumper to define the proper bus speed. The default limits it to 200MHz, the other option allows higher speeds. That's just a random thing that they did, not sure why, and a lot of people miss it.

You may not want to use the nvidia drivers from their site. The first version they had gave people a lot of headaches, and I'm about to read a thread in this forum that says the new one may be bad too. If you get the newest driver set from the Asus site, you should be good to go (it will probably be the same version, 1.16 that is on the CD so you can use that too). Also make sure you install SP1 for XP before you install the USB2.0 driver.

For the video card, you can either use the drivers on the CD, or download the latest from ATi's site. You may be able to look at the version on the CD, it might be relatively new. Drivers for pretty nearly everything should install in XP automatically, there will be only a few things that may not work until you install drivers from the CD. The manual does tell you what to install.

Make sure the board you are getting is the 2.0 of the A7N8X. This has a better nforce2 chipset and better BIOS right out of the box.