nVidia firewall - any good?

[oynaz]

Hi guys.

nVidia has supplied a firewall with my motherboard. Is it wort installing? Any experiences?

 

[secretanchitman]

no, dont install it...just install audio, ethernet, smbus, and usb if you need to.

 

[bwatson283]

ya, don't. I don't even use audio.

 

[Atheus]

No.

 

[Captante]

For the few that it runs stably for its security level is decent, but the vast majority of people who install it have nothing but trouble so I too advise against using it.

 

[ChunkiMunki]

agreed, I tried it several times and it is just too much of a PITA. what a drag, freeze ups, configuration problems etc. it was one of the reasons I bought the board is for the built-in firewall. oh well.......never again.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Hit or miss, I never had any trouble out of it.

 

[TheRyuu]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
Hit or miss...

Yea, seems that way for the firewall driver and the IDE driver. I've only tried the latter and don't have any problems with it.

 

[VIAN]

NOOOOOO

stay away!!!!

 

[Fistandantilis]

I use the nVidia firewall and I have never noticed any issues, but then again, I thought that any firewall is better than no firewall at all.
How can I tell if it is working properly?

 

[duragezic]

When I built my Barton XP rig for the first time, I install XP then do drivers and whatnot, then get several XP-style blue screens. ****, I think, thinking something is wrong with my hardware. Nope, after 2 minutes of searching I find it's that damn Nvidia firewall. I even tried it like a year later and had similar problems, so I've not dealt with it since or plan to in the future (but obviously install the rest of the chipset drivers).

 

[Aikouka]

Don't install the IDE drivers or Firewall... ever. I wondered why my PC sucked so much at transferring files around.. I removed the nVidia IDE drivers and everything was fine... after the drivers already corrupted a ton of files.

 

[neutralizer]

I had a bunch of problems with the Nvidia drivers so I installed the bare minimum.

 

[Lemon law]

I can thank this thread for basically confirming my gut instinct that using the nvadia firewall would not be the right choice. If all available firewalls were expensive and the nvadia firewall that came with your PC was both free and excellent, it might be one thing. But given there are a plethora of free firewalls, many of which are regularly updated, the nvadia firewall is at best a pig in the poke. Especially when you get on security forums and they are raving about some free firewalls that are designed to be firewalls, and not just some add in after thought.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Especially when you get on security forums and they are raving about some free firewalls that are designed to be firewalls, and not just some add in after thought.

The nvidia firewall was added as an afterthought😕

I thought (in the nForce 3 Ultra and nForce4 lines) were hardware firewalls designed into the chipset itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NForce3

Perhaps most notably, the 250 revision of the nForce 3 featured the world?s first native Gigabit Ethernet interface and a hardware-optimized Firewall. The NVIDIA Firewall technology utilizes the ActiveArmor secure networking engine. This makes the firewall an on-chip function, in theory reducing the overhead on the CPU and increasing throughput. The firewall also uses IAM, or Intelligent Application Manager, to provide application-based filtering.

 

[pcnerd37]

I used it with no problems, but I think ZoneAlarm is still a better product.