Heard a bit about this from various people- never reached conclusion

[Comdrpopnfresh]

I've come accross some people who say that it is nvdia's chips on the motherboard, so they're the best suited for writing optimized drivers. And being that the motherboard is the subject; just to periodically, fully, update the nforce drivers.

There are those who abstain completely- windows will suffice in finding what it will run on....

And those who straddle.... 'avoid the networking drivers!'
'The networking driver are all I install, forget the harddisk controller drivers!'


Is there a definitive answer? What is it... pretty... pretty please?

I know for damn sure not to rely on nforce monitoring or overclocking. I had an nforce 4 motherboard that was supposedly highly compliant (you either comply or don't... don't get this), and the software was so restricted it wasn't worth the disk space. Nowadays, my only gripe is that nvidia's special disk controller drivers enact some cloaking device on my HDD smart status. Everest can still read it, supposedly nvidia adopted a smart configuration thats better... I'm not sure.

Oh yeah, one more thing:Although motherboards in my non-transitional computers have been nforce boards (not a fanboy, just got a great first board, and good manufacturer warranty) I just recently found out that they got themselves in a legal knot and ended up having to remove platform support for PCI prefetching a while back. Does that equate to anything in a 'modern' system? I mean, all I have is my x-fi (it's working now for those waiting w/ baited breath) and a wireless card in the pci slots. To me, it's how the isa high-risers for modems and sound cards were years and years go. Anything?

 

[The Boston Dangler]

asus p5n-d, win vista ult 64 sp1

i use 20.08_nforce_winvista64_international_whql.exe. with any other driver, or no driver, i get lousy hdd throughput and "ERROR ERROR ERROR" when trying to rip a cd. 7-series chipsets do not support SMART.

i don't expect to purchase another nvidia-based motherboard.

 

[masterbm]

i do run nvidia drivers on my nforce 3 board but I actual had to hack parts of nforce 2 driver and nforce 4 driver to get vista run properly.(for the record that board board is very stable it has the record for up 5 months vista up had to update,also record with only soft reset 9 months) also never been overclocked day in life And I did have nforce 4 board up tell last month but it died it also use nforce 4 driver. That board has issue overclocking it would stop finding sata channel after about 200 mhz overclock . Ide channel fell off about 400 mhz total overclock but that pretty much was limit of that cpu

 

[Comdrpopnfresh]

Originally posted by: The Boston Dangler

i don't expect to purchase another nvidia-based motherboard.

1++

In another year or two... won't the only nvidia-based motherboards supposedly be ion? Thought the whole move is away from chipsets seeing how both major consumer platforms are using integrated memory controllers from here on out, and all the legacy i/o's are drying up. Maybe I've narrowed the time table in my head, but I thought chipsets were fading away unless they supported an in-house processor... and nvidia was denied a license to build x86? I may have become a victim of the FUD machine; that's all just my cursory understanding.

 

[NeoV]

I will never use Nvidia based motherboards again - had awful problems with several versions of Vista - Intel-based mobo now, have never had a sys crash.

 

[Comdrpopnfresh]

Same experiences here. Although to give nvidia credit- the drivers are a lot better now than the infamous rushed drivers that made vista look so bad when it first came out. Interestingly, I get less nvidia driver-related crashes now with an ati gpu then when I had all nvidia. go figure

 

[phoenix79]

hmmm, I run AMD systems and have almost always used nVidia chipsets since they came out and have used the generic nvidia drivers and never had a problem with them. Am I in the minority?

 

[Mide]

Intel boards always seemed more stable than Nvidia

 

[Comdrpopnfresh]

I had the (what could have been) last s939 board made. It had the nforce4 chipset. Problems all the time. To be fair; in the past I would uninstall a driver and without restarting install a new one, and I didn't start using driver sweeper until recently either.
But esa, alternative smart function on hdds, poor ethernet packet prioritization, and hit-and-miss nforce platform support are just poor. A sign of nvidia degradation from nf2 and nf3 days methinks.
what's up with pci-prefetch? I know it was removed by nvidia because they were improperly implementing it w/o licensing; what does it do, does it make a performance difference, and if so, how does one regain it?

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: phoenix79
hmmm, I run AMD systems and have almost always used nVidia chipsets since they came out and have used the generic nvidia drivers and never had a problem with them. Am I in the minority?

My last Athlon was using the nforce 400 chipset and it worked fine. This was on Windows XP from 2004 to 2006.

 

[winr]

i have 5 or 6 Nforce mobos, they are all AM2+.

I havent had any problems so far...




I have used in the past, VIA, SIS, AMD, INTEL, Nvidia and they all worked ok to me.

I use Nforce drivers.


🙂