Don't install nVidia's IDE drivers.

[Jeff7]

When I installed the IDE drivers on my NF7-S rev1.2, the system detected extra ATAPI devices - my DVD-ROM and CD-RW suddenly were showing duplicate SCSI drives. And they were horribly slow. The CD-RW couldn't write discs due to buffer underruns and the DVD-ROM couldn't even play DVDs smoothly - and during these events, the CPU usage went to 100%. Seemed consistent with really bad PIO mode usage.
Did some troubleshooting to attempt to get everything working properly and out of PIO mode, but I finally just went back to the default Windows drivers. Bam, everything started working normally again.
No more nVidia IDE drivers for me.


And wow, just noticed the date of the original post.

 

[Stumps]

never had any problems at all with Nvidia's ide driver, I have 2 systems on with an A7N266-VM (Nforce 220) and GA-7N400 PRO (Nforce 2 Ultra 400) both have run fine with the ide drivers.

 

[Mem]

Nvidia IDE working fine in my nforce 4 board,with DVD burner and external USB burner plus SATA HD,only problem I had was slow bootup when NCQ was enabled,took 5 secs to disable NCQ .


I forgot to say also have the Nvidia SW IDE driver installed on my old nforce 2 board too,no problems with that ,so what is all the fuss about?

 

[Heidfirst]

Originally posted by: Mem
I forgot to say also have the Nvidia SW IDE driver installed on my old nforce 2 board too,no problems with that ,so what is all the fuss about?

because a lot of people had & continue to have problems with them, notably with optical drives & burning.
Even with apparently similar rigs some people can run them fine & another will have problems.

 

[Mem]

because a lot of people had & continue to have problems with them, notably with optical drives & burning.
Even with apparently similar rigs some people can run them fine & another will have problems.

I keep hearing this, but I have been using them for about 3 or 4 years now,so very extensive testing without problems.

The only thing I would recommend is you don't install the Nvidia firewall,this is the main cause of most problems on nforce 4 boards.

 

[EndGame]

Got to agree, been using them since my first nForce board and now run 3 nForce 4 Ultra boards......never had any problems and speeds are exactly where they should be, no problems with CD/DVD players or burning............

Feel sorry for the guys with problems with the drivers and hope I never do run into it........

 

[Heidfirst]

Originally posted by: Mem
I keep hearing this, but I have been using them for about 3 or 4 years now,so very extensive testing without problems.

So have I across approximately 15 nForce2, 3 & 4 boards.
Unfortunately my experience says that not always but sometimes the problems do rear their heads.

 

[russki]

I had a nforce2 system and installed the ide drivers.. all was fine for some time then I remember things started to crap out on me, blue screens, weird optical drive accesses. I uninstalled the NV IDE driver and all was well.

 

[Rafterman]

I've been running the NVidia IDE drivers for over 2 years with no problems. I have carried out tests comparing both the MS and NVidia IDE drivers and I found there was not much of a difference in speeds ect. The one thing I will say about the NVidia drivers is a lot of software apps have trouble with them. For instance if you are using Nero the Nero log will always show the drives as having DMAFF when this is not the case. Nero will work and do what its supposed to do all the same. Another app that has issues with NVidia drivers is Plexitools and although most of the plexitools utilities will operate perfectly well, the information given on the installed drives is not as concise as when you have MS drivers installed(i believe Plextor is addressing these issues in upcoming upgrades). So to the point, NVidia IDE drivers in my experience work fine for the job they were designed to do although 3rd party software may not have been developed to intergrate with them as well as they do with MS IDE drivers.