BACK TO 2.03 !!! new nForce driver is out. v2.41 WHQL

[larciel]

here

i've waited for this before a 'annual clean (not monthly, thanks to winxp ) install


*EDIT* 5/23/03

they released 2.42 , 2.41 w/out ill-fated IDE Driver.... now they removed 2.42 as well... going back to 2.03 ..

*sigh* i feel another clean install coming in a week or so

 

[wicktron]

Thanks for the heads up!

 

[Doh!]

Finally! Thanks for the link.

 

[Killrose]

Cool, wonder if people who could'nt do 200MHz FSB before will be able to now?

 

[TheBoyBlunder]

Anyone notice any difference with these drivers (as opposed to the previous ones)?

 

[pelikan]

Just installed them in my A7N8X-Deluxe. They seem to work pretty well. Sound crackling problem is reduced. Benchmarks are about the same, except PCMark shows memory score 10% lower. Sandra memory is about the same though. Gaming seems the same.

 

[Killrose]

I wonder if it will fix the "chipmunk" sound in the BF1942 Demo when using the 8RDA 2-channel sound. The actual game works fine.

 

[squidman]

They got SUPER-REVERB (i mean it) when EAX is enabled in open-terrain games (ooperation flashpoint red hammer)

 

[Noid]

Can anyone try accessing these driver right now ... ?

The links on the download page are not working for me ...

_________ Edit ________

nm ... I had to disable my firewall .... they must be sending/recieving something my firewall didnt like.

 

[beatle]

Any reason not to go with these drivers and wait for some to be released by Abit? (NF7-S)

 

[Mooncalf]

Is it still best to use the WIndows version IDE drivers when it asks or go with the SW ones?

 

[yodayoda]

Originally posted by: Mooncalf
Is it still best to use the WIndows version IDE drivers when it asks or go with the SW ones?

NO! the nVidia IDE drivers blow away the MS drivers. i am getting a very healthy 10% boost in average sequencial read in HDTach with the new drivers versus the old. way to go nVidia... this confirms while i will never go back to via.

 

[Megatomic]

I tried the new drivers on a fresh install of WinXP Pro and I didn't like the SW IDE drivers at all. They seemed faster but they parked my hard drive heads when Windows was exiting/shutting down and each drive was spun up individually on boot up. Both of these events prolonged the start-up and shutdown which isn't a good step forward. Plus, the parking of the drives can't be good for them in the long run. I'll sacrifice a minor performance gain to increase the life of my equipment by a few months/years.

Needless to say, I did ANOTHER fresh install of WinXP and bypassed the install of the SW IDE drivers the second time.

I feel like a broken record posting this message so many times.

 

[Pilsnerpete]

Please update this thread with any fixes for the sw IDE drivers. I guess they mess up game access too.

 

[mechBgon]

At work today, I did some "time trials" between the 2.03's and the 2.41's on an nForce 220D system with an IDE drive, and also on my own SCSI-equipped system.

Test: do a timed on-demand virus scan of 738Mb of data comprising 17900+ files. This is my administrative installation point for Office2000 Professional Disc 2 with SP3 pre-integrated, if you're curious what's getting scanned.

System 1

• Asus A7N266-VM
• AthlonXP 1800+
• 256Mb Crucial PC2100
• Maxtor 40Gb 7200rpm IDE drive
• Win2000 SP3+

Results, taken on second run:

With 2.03 drivers: 1m 48s
With 2.41 drivers: 1m 44s, or about 3.5% faster at the system level



Of course, my own system cleaned house...

System 2

• Asus A7N8X-Deluxe rev. 2
• AthlonXP 1700+
• 1024Mb Crucial PC2700 @ PC2100 speed (my third 512Mb module is out on loan )
• Seagate Cheetah X15-36LP 15000rpm SCSI hard drive
• Windows2000 SP3+

Results, first run (data coming from hard drive):

With 2.03 drivers: 1m 09s
With 2.41 drivers, SW IDE driver installed: 1m 09s

Results, second run (data mostly cached in RAM now):

With 2.03 drivers: 0m 42s
With 2.41 drivers: 0m 42s

From these two sets of results, it seems like real-world system-level performance gets a little boost on nForce classic. My nForce2 system doesn't have an IDE hard drive in it, but what's notable is that my PCI SCSI adapter didn't suffer due to the installation of the SW IDE drivers. Maybe tomorrow I'll burn a couple of CDs on my IDE CD burner and see how it likes that, since that was the other sore spot for WinXP users who've had the SW IDE option in the past (an option now available to Win2000 users like me).

 

[Doh!]

It seems like my burner (Liteon 52x) likes the new IDE drivers as CD speed shows much less yellow boxes (none at all, actually) with the same media brand (from the same pack - super cheap brand). No problems with the new drivers whatsoever.

 

[Palek]

I've got a rev. 1.04 A7N8X Deluxe board (with 1004 BIOS) and an XP 2400+ running Windows 2000 SP3, and my machine stopped booting after installing the new IDE drivers. I had to do a rollback to the last bootable configuration (thankfully Win2k has this option) to get the PC running again. I removed the driver package, then reinstalled it, bypassing the IDE driver install this time. I guess there is good reason why the IDE drivers are not WHQL certified just yet... All the other components are working fine.

So, Win2k people, tread carefully!

 

[AMDfreak]

Originally posted by: Palek
I've got a rev. 1.04 A7N8X Deluxe board (with 1004 BIOS) and an XP 2400+ running Windows 2000 SP3, and my machine stopped booting after installing the new IDE drivers. I had to do a rollback to the last bootable configuration (thankfully Win2k has this option) to get the PC running again. I removed the driver package, then reinstalled it, bypassing the IDE driver install this time. I guess there is good reason why the IDE drivers are not WHQL certified just yet... All the other components are working fine.

The exact same thing happened with me in WinXP Pro. I followed the same steps to correct the problem too. I'm running an NF7-S 2.0 with 2 30GB drives in RAID 0 on the SATA ports, 3 120GB drives in RAID 5 on a RocketRAID 404, and my DVD-ROM, CD-ROM, and CD_RW are all SCSI on an Adaptec 2940 card. With nothing running on my IDE ports, it is really odd that the new SW IDE driver would cause my system not to boot.....

 

[larciel]

new IDE driver caused the HD head's 'parking' when exiting windows, like the other guy said, it really sucked.. i did fresh install again.

 

[scrubman]

nVidia has updated the driver today... they REMOVED the IDE software drivers completely...



LINK

 

[Pilsnerpete]

Since this is a thread about the drivers....

I see in the advanced tab of the nVidia LAN configuration, there's an "optimize for" line. The options are "CPU" and "Throughput". The default is CPU. It seems like there's a difference in dloading now that I switched it to Throughput. I'll dload the drivers again with optimize for CPU just to be sure.
Every1 but me probably knows about this setting. Guess I'm behind the times here. CPU usage is close to an average of 4 to 5% usage when it's optimized for throughput. 16.8 kbps @ Download Complete in IE6.
When optimized for CPU: 16.5 kbps @ Download Complete. I'd say 2 to 3% cpu usage.
I didn't test cpu usage or network throughput with any tools btw. Just your basic, "oh...THIS is faster."

BTW, I installed the sw IDE drivers and now, even though I reverted back, I get an Eaccessviolation when I try to access the cdrom, but only when the Asus nForce2 disc is in it. asusqfe is in the top left corner of the error box. Every other disc seems to autoplay just fine. Any idea what this could be?

 

[mechBgon]

Originally posted by: scrubman
nVidia has updated the driver today... they REMOVED the IDE software drivers completely...



LINK

Fascinating. Thanks for the sharp eye

 

[Noid]

wtf ... does that mean we should be looking out for problems?

I havent had any so far ... hmmmm ... I didnt notice any HD issues at all ...

Maybe I should just Ghost back to previous.

 

[pelikan]

I thought I was okay with nvidias ide drivers until I found out WinDVD didn't work anymore. So I "rolled back."

 

[Noid]

Geeze ... I just did a 'restart' ... to see if I could hear the heads parking ... (i didnt)

but ,,,,

On reboot ,,, my drives weren't detected ... Is that a symtom of the heads parking ?
(I did a softboot ,,, and the 'reboot' was ok now)

I rollback if it happens again.