In XP, for example, the onboard NIC wouldn't even work without the nForce 4 AMD Forceware chipset drivers, which included the NIC, audio, SMBus, IDE, etc. So in XP, I always installed everything in the newest nForce4 forceware, except the Nvidia firewall of course.
In Vista, everything seemingly works OK without them and I'm not sure if I need the chipset ones.
The only options in the setup are:
Nvidia SMBus driver
Nvidia Ethernet driver
Nvidia MediaShield
My onboard NIC worked right off the bat with MS drivers, and not sure about SMBus for things like temp sensors, because I haven't tried Speedfan or the like to see if the Vista-provided ones work.
So are they even required? One might say, if it works, why bother with it, but are there any performance gains to be had by installing the Nvidia-supplied ethernet and SMBus drivers as opposed to Vista provided ones?
Cause why else would they even provide the forceware package for Vista if it didn't need it, ya know? Note that I don't need MediaShield, as it just seems like it is for a software RAID.
Also, I thought I would have the option to install Nvidia IDE drivers. Because in Device Manager, there is no mention of SATA controller, and I can't tell which one is my lone SATA drive. In XP, the SATA drive was the only one with the option to enable/disable NCQ, but there is no such options in Vista. I don't know how it is numbered... it just shows
ATA Channel 0
ATA Channel 0
ATA Channel 1
ATA Channel 1
I guess this is normal? Vista seems to call everything ATA device, whether it is PATA or SATA. I only have one device showing Ultra DMA Mode 6, so that may be the SATA drive.
In Vista, everything seemingly works OK without them and I'm not sure if I need the chipset ones.
The only options in the setup are:
Nvidia SMBus driver
Nvidia Ethernet driver
Nvidia MediaShield
My onboard NIC worked right off the bat with MS drivers, and not sure about SMBus for things like temp sensors, because I haven't tried Speedfan or the like to see if the Vista-provided ones work.
So are they even required? One might say, if it works, why bother with it, but are there any performance gains to be had by installing the Nvidia-supplied ethernet and SMBus drivers as opposed to Vista provided ones?
Cause why else would they even provide the forceware package for Vista if it didn't need it, ya know? Note that I don't need MediaShield, as it just seems like it is for a software RAID.
Also, I thought I would have the option to install Nvidia IDE drivers. Because in Device Manager, there is no mention of SATA controller, and I can't tell which one is my lone SATA drive. In XP, the SATA drive was the only one with the option to enable/disable NCQ, but there is no such options in Vista. I don't know how it is numbered... it just shows
ATA Channel 0
ATA Channel 0
ATA Channel 1
ATA Channel 1
I guess this is normal? Vista seems to call everything ATA device, whether it is PATA or SATA. I only have one device showing Ultra DMA Mode 6, so that may be the SATA drive.
