MSI K8N Diamond Plus advise

[Ozzy20]

This board comes with 2 floppy disks, one contains nVRaid SATA drivers, the other one has Silicon Image SATA drivers.I got Western Digital WD2000JS HDD (200GB SATA2), so when I installed Windows XP, I had to choose between these two floppies, got little confused cause I didnt know which one would be better. I installed the Silicon Image drivers, cause I thought I would get better performance, but I dont know if thats true. Please advise, would there have been any difference if I used the nVRaid drivers?

cheers

 

[ND40oz]

You shouldn't need either of the drivers with just one harddisk when your not setting up a raid array. I've done 6 different installs on this board over the past few days to check stability (XP, MCE, XP 64bit each twice) and none of them have needed drivers from a floppy.

I'm using the nVidia ports for now, haven't noticed any problems. Just check the first two boxes when installing the nForce drivers and leave the second two unchecked (IDE and something else, it's the last one). As long as you just install the sm bus drivers (first check box) and the nic drivers (second box) you shouldn't have any problems. I didn't install the firewall either.

I doubt you'll see any performance differences when using the SI ports instead of the NV ports.