Slowness after mobo drivers installed

[Kvetch]

Hello - I am seeing so speed issues when I load my motherboard nvidia 6.66 drivers and I had a question about the IDE SW drivers. I have an
AMD64 3000+
Epox EP-9NPA+Ultra Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4
CORSAIR ValueSelect 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 Dual Channel
HITACHI Deskstar T7K250 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s
Antec SmartPower 2.0 SP-500 ATX12V 500W Power Supply
GIGABYTE Geforce 6600 256MB DDR PCI Express x16 Video Card

My First Question -
I noticed after I install a clean build XP w/SP2. The XP splash screen is barely on the screen before XP is loaded. I am not using the Ethernet card so I don't load that driver but after I load the SMBus drivers and reboot I noticed that the XP splash screen takes a whole lot longer to load. While I know this is not a true speed test but I wondered if this is right. I wouldn't think loading the drivers would slow the XP bootup process. The little Knight Rider display thing takes about 2 and a half passes before XP loads and before the SMBus driver it takes about 1/4 of one pass. Is this something I should worry about?

Second Question -
Since I do not have my SATA II drive in a RAID should I load the IDE SW drivers? Will I see any benefit?

Thanks,
Nick

 

[FlyingPenguin]

Even if you have IDE drives (which you do - I assume you have an IDE CD-Rom) you still don't need the IDE SW drivers. The software drivers have their issues and most people don't install them.

 

[Kvetch]

Thanks. I was a little wary about installing them. Are the SMBus drivers needed?

While the machine appears to respond fine, I shouldn't see a slow down after loading the nvidia drivers.
I tried the following - installed XPw/SP2, just loaded the ethernet driver for the built in NIC and then XP slowed down.

I then put a Linksys Nic and disabled the NIC in the BIOS.
installed XPw/SP2, just loaded SMBus controller driver and then XP slowed down.

What does the SMBus driver give me?

 

[FlyingPenguin]

Yes you do need the SMBus driver, but it shouldn't cause problems.

I would use the latest NVidia mobo drivers on your mobo manufacturer's web site, even if they aren't the latest NVidia drivers. Some mobos may not work properly with the generic NVidia drivers.

 

[Kvetch]

Thanks for replying again. When I did my test of just loading the built in NIC drivers I used the ones from Epox but still got slower boot speeds. According to the nvidia site it is still using the same SMBus driver since before 6.39. So I guess they haven't updated that piece for the nforce drivers.