Windows 10 - nForce 680i?

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Hi,

Not sure if this would be better in the motherboard section, but...

A friend of mine has an older Alienware PC with an nForce 680i SLI motherboard. He's currently running Windows Vista 32-bit, for which he has my sympathy. I know that Nvidia gave up writing drivers for nForce chipsets after Windows 7, but has anyone tried installing Windows 10 on 680i? If so, what happened?

Thanks!
 
only thing I can think of is to install W10 on to a spare HDD or SSD and give it ago if it doesn't work then go back to the previous HDD\SSD.

looking on the Nvidia site there is drivers for W10 for a GTX 680
 
only thing I can think of is to install W10 on to a spare HDD or SSD and give it ago if it doesn't work then go back to the previous HDD\SSD.

looking on the Nvidia site there is drivers for W10 for a GTX 680

I upgraded to windows 10 with a gts8800 installed.... So you should be ok :P Why not just take a full image of the OS first with a free backup tool and then just try it :)

OP doesnt mean GFX, he is on about nForce 680 motherboards. Its a chipset.

OP, I really dont know the answer I am affraid. :(
 
I know that Nvidia gave up writing drivers for nForce chipsets after Windows 7

I honestly had no idea. Is nForce a dead/end of life product now? I haven't had nForce since 1 and 2. After that they ditched SoundStorm and there was a huge uproar. Most people stopped buying them after that.
 
Nvidia ended nForce a long while ago (about 5 years now?). It was caused by Intel not allowing them to build chipsets for the first gen i series, which then made Nvidia decide to leave the chipset business (they already stopped making AMD chipsets due to lack of popularity): http://www.zdnet.com/article/end-of-the-line-for-nvidia-chipsets-and-thats-official/

Will Windows 10 have drivers for the chipset? Honestly no idea. I would give it a go anyway and see how it works, 10 seems to be very good at finding drivers so far.
 
nForce you say? :eek:

Reminds me of my EPoX motherboard which had nForce. Had about 10+ upgrade since. lol.

I do say! :)

I was still using an nForce board myself until earlier this year - 780a chipset with a Phenom II. Had a lot of nForce boards over the years, I was sorry to see Nvidia pull out of that market.

Thanks for the replies, I do have an old HDD I could lend him to try the install, I might give that a go.
 
Weren't the nForce boards from version 3 onwards not plagued with problems? Corruption?

I never had a 3 (1, 2, some variety of 4, 650i SLI and 780a SLI only) but the only major problem I ever had was with the Nvidia firewall, which for me at least prevented all communication with the Internet... so in terms of protection I guess it was the best firewall in the world!

I had more trouble with VIA chipset boards than nforce.
 
Weren't the nForce boards from version 3 onwards not plagued with problems? Corruption?

Yeah lots of problems - there was only one 600 series board that was actually fully 100% stable (and even that had a lot of FSB holes) most were actually only like 95% stable at best - something I found out the hard way :S. A lot of the 700 series had some serious underlying bugs with video playback and other issues.
 
I'm still using an AMD nForce 780a Chipset board for my HTPC... Seems pretty stable but has no chance in hell of overclocking a Phenom II, the settings just don't work lol
 
No idea what the AMD nForce chipsets were like - the Intel ones other than the first couple of generations were mostly pretty dire some exceptions aside.
 
I never had a 3 (1, 2, some variety of 4, 650i SLI and 780a SLI only) but the only major problem I ever had was with the Nvidia firewall, which for me at least prevented all communication with the Internet... so in terms of protection I guess it was the best firewall in the world!

I had more trouble with VIA chipset boards than nforce.

Good one, "best firewall in the world"... :D I had a nForce 7ish years back, no prob. with the firewall with me...
 
I'm still using an AMD nForce 780a Chipset board for my HTPC... Seems pretty stable but has no chance in hell of overclocking a Phenom II, the settings just don't work lol

I had to disable Cool & Quiet in the BIOS of my 780a board (Asus M3N72-T Deluxe) to get any overclocking settings to work. After that I was able to run my 965 at 3.8 just by changing the multiplier and it was stable.
 
In case anyone's interested, I got bored and dragged a load of old bits out of my loft and built another PC. I can confirm that Windows 10 will install on an nForce 780a chipset motherboard at least, without any NVidia drivers being required!
 
But your mileage may very. My Dad has an old PC which has a nForce4 chipset happily running Windows 7. He tried upgrading it to Windows 10 but it just won't do it (get to the part of the install where it is looking for drivers and then stops at that stage).

On the upside it rolled back to Windows & quite happily.
 
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