vnf4 network troubles

[blipblop]

i've had my system since friday and it has been flawless. But last night, my ethernet on the board just went crazy. I kept receiving that little bubble on the systray saying "unplugged from network" like over and over again. It seems to be losing and regaining a connection every 3 times a second. I checked the ethernet cable with my laptop and it was fine. It was working fine earlier in the day.. any ideas on what i should do? thanks

 

[GadgetBuilder]

This dropout problem seems to be common with the NF4 chip and nVidia's drivers. If you're not using the 6.53 driver set from nVidia's site you might try that, it seems to be better than earlier versions.

Sometimes the sequence of installing things affects the operation. A clean install of XP followed by installation of the nVidia drivers seems to work better than installing other drivers and programs before the nVidia stuff. Best guess is that there is a problem with the nVidia driver set or the installer that affects a small fraction of NF3/NF4 owners. Visit the nVidia mobo forum and poke around to get a feel for the problem:
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?s=f3...ead353326152f9b12af806c46&showforum=34

The most common problems mentioned in the nVidia mobo forums concern the firewall/NAM/Active Armor stuff so you might also try installing the drivers and leave the firewall out temporarily - the 6.53 driver set makes this possible. So far, there don't seem to be any solid answers just things you can try which might make the problem go away -- more along the lines of black magic that technical wizardry.

 

[bradley]

The more I read about the Nforce4 chipset, the less I like it.

 

[Samus]

The included drivers are outdated. Upgrade to nVidia's 6.53 drivers from www.nvidia.com

Chaintech is irresponsible and not shipping current drivers with current releases of the board, let alone including a note emphasising to do so.

All nForce reliability/stability problems have been fixed with the 6.53's. Don't let old drivers put a bad taste in your mouth, there is no doubt the nForce4 is the fastest, most stable, most overclockable chipset for S939. Any review site, including AT will explain how and why this is true.

-Tim

p.s. it's amazing your network has worked this long blipblop, mine flaked out after a few hours with the included drivers

 

[GadgetBuilder]

Not everyone has had good luck with the 6.53 driver set. Before concluding that 6.53 solves all stability/reliability issues, visit the nVidia mobo forum noted in my earlier post and carefully look through the threads there. My conclusion from studying that forum is that there are significant problems remaining in the 6.53 installer/driver set.

In fact, I have encountered some of these problems with 6.53 so I've been there, and I continue to have some unexplained symptoms:

Attempting to install 6.53 on my system caused a BSOD on the first access to the internet when the firewall was active. Turning the firewall Off allowed normal access to the net.

I finally reformatted and did a clean install of XP SP2 followed immediately by the 6.53 driver set and the firewall - this eliminated the BSODs. My clean installation works fairly well with only a couple of minor issues:
1) When browsing, I frequently click on a link and nothing happens; clicking again works normally. This may be related to the dropout issue which started this thread.
2) The firewall flogs my disk several times a second via NSVCIP.EXE, even if logging is disabled and the firewall is turned off. Removing the firewall does stop the flogging. One other user on the nVidia forums has encountered the same problem.

Only a small fraction of NF3/NF4 owners complain in the nVidia forum but the complaints have several recurring themes - the browsing problem above comes up frequently as does the BSOD on accessing the net with firewall enabled.

The odd thing about the commonly encountered NF4/driver problems is that they don't seem to be reproducible - there is something random about them so most users either don't have a problem or perhaps don't recognize that they have a problem because some of the effects are subtle and not easily connected to the NF4 drivers. For example, with the original driver set I found that IE's favicons didn't work when the nVidia firewall was active but magically came back when the firewall was set to Off -- hard to say how the firewall could interfere with retrieval of icon files stored on my hard disk but the behavior was repeatable prior to installing 6.53.

The frustrating thing about the nVidia forum is that nVidia seems to be insulated from or ignoring the complaints there - they never visit or ask questions and don't seem to be deliberately solving the reported problems. Nor does nVidia provide any way for users to contact them; the party line is "see your mobo vendor, we are chip makers" even though nVidia supplied the CD containing the original drivers. Hard to say if nVidia's approach is that these problems can be ignored because only a few users are affected - but if you're one of those affected it certainly causes second thoughts about buying another nVidia product.

Problems reported by a REVIEWER (as opposed to an owner) seem to get speedy attention, for example:
http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/4370/

If you look here:
http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/vnf4ultra/8.html

You'll note that the fix was still not available to consumers as of April 14 so 6.53, released in mid March, apparently doesn't include this fix.

Overall, I believe the nVidia drivers will work acceptably for most users but will cause problems for a small fraction of NF4 owners -- it remains unclear how to determine beforehand which system configurations will be affected and nVidia doesn't seem to be trying to correlate problems to hardware/software configurations. Sometimes a clean install of XP and the drivers will improve the situation (as it did for me) and sometimes it won't help. An observation: SP2 systems seem to be affected more often than earlier versions.

Unfortunately, there is little appreciation for the apparently random nature of the problem by the majority of NF4 owners who simply don't encounter (or don't recognize) an nVidia driver issue in their system.

 

[blipblop]

i fixed it my own way, i took an old nic, and popped it in and it works like a charm =] so until the onboard has an actual fix, i'm going to go on my merry way, thanks for the heads up about the drivers!

 

[TheJTrain]

I'm having a different problem - the onboard network worked great with the factory drivers, great with the 6.53 drivers, then out of nowhere the connection disappeared from the network connections window and the network adapter disappeared from the Device Manager. Windows just doesn't see it anymore (though the light on the back still comes on when the cable is plugged in). Rebooting didn't help, a reformat/fresh reinstall of WinXP didn't help - it's just not there. Anyone seen this? I'll try the "unplug it for 5 minutes fix" but I doubt it'll help.

Disregard the system specs in my sig, I haven't updated them yet. Here's what I'm running now:
Chaintech VNF4Ultra
A64 3200+
Gigabyte GeForce 6600GT
1GB Geil PC3200 at 2-3-3-10T
80GB Samsung SATA HD