nForce3 Ultra chipset + Windows Vista = horrible performance

BehindEnemyLines

Senior member
Jul 24, 2000
979
0
76
A friend of mine bought Vista Home Premium unknowningly his motherboard is based on the nForce3 Ultra chipset. After installing and updating using Windows Update, he got the sound to work (Windows Update automatically installed the drivers since it wasn't detected BEFORE the update). Every other devices also work properly. However, the overall performance is terrible. It's unbearable compared to my desktop.

He has:
* nForce3 Ultra chipset motherboard (maybe Biostar)
* 1.5GB of RAM PC3200 (DDR)
* Athlon 64 (the slowest one) Socket 939
* An older 128MB NVidia GeForce AGP video card (don't remember which)

Problems:
* Aero works fine, but the animation is not smooth at all. Dragging any window is very choppy. Minimizing and maximing are also choppy.
* Doing multitasking such as listening to music or watching video while using torrent causes stuttering.
* Overall, very sluggish compared to XP SP2.

Is there anything that he can do to improve the performance? I am thinking of installing the two leaked hotfixes from MS earlier (reliability and performance KB938194 and KB938979). It seems this is most likely a chipset issue or driver issue. Even my 3-yr-old laptop supports Vista flawlessly. NVIDIA :|

We'll probably have to go back to XP.
 

n7

Elite Member
Jan 4, 2004
21,281
4
81
Stay away from nV chipsets if you want support for more than a year down the road.

Actually, they've done a pretty good job of ignoring issues with their Forceware drivers in the past...

IOW, make sure your next mobo is P35 or X38 :D
Intel chipsets are very good overall, & usually always have been.
 

Stumps

Diamond Member
Jun 18, 2001
7,125
0
0
Vista works fine on most NF3 setup's, my A64 runs vista Ultimate and it has no issues what so ever with Windows Vista.
It's specs are as follows

Athlon 64 3000+@2.87ghz skt 754
Gigabyte GA-K8NS PRO (nf3 250)
1.5GB DDR400
Sapphire X1950Pro 512mb AGP
2x WD1200JB in raid 0 (240gb)

One thing I have noticed about Windows Vista is that if a slower video card is used, it greatly affects overall system performance, especially if Aero is enabled.

I've tried Vista on older AXP's and found them unbearable with cards like 5200's/6200's and 9500/9600's with aero enabled, as soon as I changed the video card for a 9700Pro, 6800 or something similar the performance increases quite a bit.

Maybe the OP's problem could be related to his unknown older Geforce card.
 

DainBrammage

Platinum Member
May 16, 2000
2,394
1
81
Screw Nvidia and nForce.
Windows Vista: Code 43 Error in Device Manager in Systems with ATI AGP Cards and Nforce3 Chipset Motherboards

Symptoms:
Attempting to install the graphics driver on a system containing an NVidia NF3 chipset and an ATI AGP graphics adapter may result in the driver failing to install and the 3D engine not activating.

In Windows Vista 32bit or 64bit versions, the Device Manager will show a (!) mark and the AGP card will operate in PCI mode only. When the properties of the device are shown, the error code will show as code 43.

Solution:

NVIDIA has determined that this issue is specific to nForce3 based systems utilizing AMD Athlon X2 dual core CPU's and running Microsoft Vista. The NVIDIA nForce3 core logic predates multi-core CPU's and was not designed to support them. As a result this problem will not be resolved via drivers or system bios updates. At this time the only known solutions to this issue under Microsoft Vista is to use a single core processor, or to upgrade to a newer motherboard platform.

What a crock of SH!7!!!!! This is my setup and my dual core 4200 runs just fine on XP pro. I have to disable a processor core to get it to run with Vista. These guys are goddamned chislers. F NVIDIA.
 

Operandi

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
5,508
0
0
I just put Vista Home Pre. on nForce3, Athlon64 3000+, AMD Radeon 9550 1GB Shuttle and it seems comparable to XP to me.
 

BehindEnemyLines

Senior member
Jul 24, 2000
979
0
76
I recently installed the two leaked hotfixes from Microsoft, and the performance seems to improve. The AGP GART update using XP drivers improve the video a little bit, but there are still stuttering and audio sync issues when watching full-screen avi files with WMP11 (at 100% size the audio is fine). Interestingly, Media Player Classic doesn't have audio sync issues, but video stuttering is apparent if you try to do something intensive in the background such as burning an Audio CD at 32x. All hard drives and optical drives are in DMA/UDMA modes.

After a few of those tweaks, the machine is more usable/manageable now although I personally wouldn't use it. If I have to guess, the Geforce FX 5500 128MB AGP might be the reason for the terrible video/animation performance.

I heard somewhere NVIDIA might release an updated chipset driver for the nF3...what are the chances?
 

Schadenfroh

Elite Member
Mar 8, 2003
38,416
4
0
Originally posted by: BehindEnemyLines
I heard somewhere NVIDIA might release an updated chipset driver for the nF3...what are the chances?

From what I have read over at forums.nvidia.com, nvidia is only supporting nforce4 and later chipsets. No driver updates for nforce3 and before, even though you can look at archived images of nvidia's website stating that the nforce3 is fully vista compatible, they have since taken that down.