Which NForce drivers for Abit NF7-S using Vista?

PeterT

PeterT

PeterT

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Hi, I took the plunge and picked up a copy of Vista Home Premium and proceeded to install into one of my three Nf7-S 2.0 machines.
The installation halted pretty quickly as it could not locate any of my hard drives in the Raid 0 array. Not to be detered, I popped in a floppy containing the Silicon Image 1.0.0.50 drivers and away we went again. The whole thing installed with what appeared to be no problem.
Time to check Device manager and there was an ! alongside the SM BUS manager.
I popped in the disc containing the NForce 5.10 drivers and there was a file relating to the SM BUS manager. I clicked to install and Bingo the ! disappeared.
A trip to Sounblaster gave me a Vista driver for my Audigy 2 and so all appeared well in Device manager.
My question relates to the other drivers in the NForce 5.10 package.
The drivers that I need info on are these:

Nvidia Gart Driver
Nvidia Memory controller driver
Nvidia IDE driver.

What do these 3 drivers do and do you think that I need them? I do not use the IDE driver in XP as it used to cause probs.
The Nforce 2 chipset is not officially supported for Vista so I am looking to you for a bit of help here.

Something that is also a bit strange is the fact that the Vista built in drivers for my X800 graphics card seem to work well. I tried to add the latest CCC driver from the ATI website and it did not want to play at all saying that the drivers had installed but there were probs. I tried a Beta driver and the same prob. An ! now appeared alongside the graphics card in device manager.
The only way to get things back again was to reinstall Vista which is not a big job. So what is going on here, Vista's ATI drivers are fine but ATI's own drivers caused probs?
Thanks for your thoughts

PeterT
 
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You can theoretically use your old XP drivers. Just find the installer routine exe file and right click on it. Select compatability and tick the box for run in XP compatibility mode. Works 99.99% of the time.

I'm doing this with my NVidia 7900GTO SLi system as NVidia still don't have stable release drivers, can you believe it?
 
Id try installing gart and then the ATI drivers again, and also the memory controller driver. U should use the nvidia driver download page to get latest version (32 or 64-bit).
 
Well it is true, don't bother trying to get Vista going on an Nforce 2 board.
The lack of ability to install the Gart driver for the Abit NF7-S motherboard results in a system that will not play games. I tried installing a couple of games that other people have got running on Vista and they just do not run.

Visually you can get the system up and running and have a good look at the features although it is a bit slow compare to XP.
Back on XP and the performance has returned.
I have to say that I am disappointed with Nvidia, why won't they release Vista chipset drivers for the Nforce 2 boards??

PeterT.
 
To be honest, you're not missing much. My EVGA 680i system crashes about once a day and my ASUS 650i system recovers from a failure evry few minutes and actually crashes every couple of hours if I use the WHQL graphics drivers. As far as I can tell, there are still no non-beta Vista drivers for the 650i chipset.
 
Holy thread resurrection Batman! :D

Actually - Vista seems to be settling down now. The NVidia drivers are still poor, but my X-Fi works now and Microsoft do seem to have stabilized what was a very buggy initial release. I'd still say run with XP Pro if you have the option.
 
PeterT said:
Well it is true, don't bother trying to get Vista going on an Nforce 2 board.
Click to expand...

Things may have changed since you posted this but - for the OP - I have a Barton 2500 and an Abit NF7-v2 running Vista Ultimate quite happily. I don't think I even did anything driver-wise with respect to my motherboard, everything seems to work fine. There's a yellow mark in device manager but it's something to do with an IDE driver that I obviously don't need as everything works fine.

For example I downloaded and played the C&C3 demo yesterday and it ran "fine" in terms of stability. There was an issue with a DX driver message but downloading and installing the latest DX9 from MS solved this.

So, yes, you can use Vista with a NF2 setup, quite happily in my experience.
 
When I tried to install Vista I managed to remove all of the ! from device manager.
Everything was so slow although it looked good and my windows experience scores were OK. I gave up when trying to run a game as it was hopeless.

Robbie, please could you give a deatailed run through how you installed Vista.
I am running raid 0 on my system so I do need to use the SATA 1.0.0.50 driver so that it recognises my drives and partitions.
I know that the NForce 5.10 Gart driver messes it all up big time!

Fingers crossed that you come up with the goods.

Cheers, PeterT
 
Peter

I'm not running RAID but all I did was put the DVD in, format the drive, and go through the installation. All was working but I got the latest manufacturer's drivers for most of my kit but not the mobo. I've just looked and the "!"s are next to:

- Network controller (networking working fine)
- SM Bus controller (don't know what this is but it doesn't seem to be affecting my system adversely)

Sorry not sure what else I can offer because my Vista install was trouble free.
 
Hi Robbie, thanks for the reply.
You can get rid of the SM Bus controller ! using the suitable driver on the Nforce 5.10.
On the other hand if it works leave it alone!!
Does your system seem sluggish compared to XP or are you pleased with performance?
Games would not run properly for me.

Cheers, PeterT
 
I'm utterly gobsmacked that these older Socket A systems run Vista at all - but it just goes to show how fast they were at the time.
 
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