Sorry about the length of this but it is an ongoing problem of some importance.
It's unclear whether it is the drivers or something else going on with the nVidia stuff. I've been watching the nVidia forums for several months and notice a peculiar pattern to the complaints. Complaints are not limited to the IDE driver, all the nVidia drivers in the mobo set draw complaints, where the number and type of complaints change little over the (sparse number of) releases.
It is hard to say whether the problem is in individual drivers, the installer(which seems to be improving with each release) or perhaps something in the NF2/NF3/NF4 chips themselves that nVidia hasn't caught in their testing. Best guess is that about 2% of nVidia based mobos are affected. Updating drivers infrequently fixes a system which exhibits a particular problem, lending credibility to the concept of a hardware problem.
In watching the nVidia mobo forum for a couple of months now I have noted some common themes in the problems/symptoms reported:
Driver installation is often problematical and success sometimes requires re-install of XP (I had to do a clean install of XP to load the 6.53 drivers):
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=5146
One oddity is that a system can change for no apparent reason:
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=4978
One user reported that he kept rma'ing the mobo until he got one that worked;
this lends some weight to the hardware flaw in NF* chips:
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?show...53&mode=threaded&show=&st=&#entry20653
Here, a driver didn't work properly when installed by the nVidia installer but worked when installed directly:
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?show...00&mode=threaded&show=&st=&#entry35200
These examples help to explain why some owners complain bitterly while most can't understand the fuss and may dismiss the complainers as incompetent. There is some unknown factor which causes some situations to fail and seemingly identical situations to work.
I don't have enough experience with forums to determine whether the number of complaints and the issues raised in the nVidia mobo forum are unusual or par for the course but I do find the lack of response to the issues by nVidia surprising.
There are many problems/symptoms reported in the nVidia mobo forum, so concentrate on threads with over 500 views:
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?s=f3...ead353326152f9b12af806c46&showforum=34
I have attempted to survey and briefly categorize the symptoms reported in the nVidia mobo forum by the particular driver the owner blames; hard to say how good individual owners are at properly determining the underlying cause but in most cases there seems to be a consensus...
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NAM (firewall): BSOD; P2P (bittorrent, emule) crash/ disconnect/slow; can't connect to certain sites (each user reports different problem sites); ftp blocked (sometimes works for a while); IE favicons don't work (recover if NAM disabled); excessive disk access
NIC: BSOD; random disconnects; no connection; slow connection; occasionally have to click a link twice
IDE/ATA: BSOD; disk corruption; NCQ causes corruption; slow access; disk conflict when dvd added; Maxtor drives frequently have trouble in NF3/NF4 systems.
SMB: BSOD
RAID: interrupt flood slows system; setup difficulty on some systems
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nVidia ignores their forums and never responds or participates. Given the number of issues raised in the nVidia mobo forum, I find it surprising that more reviewers of NF3 and NF4 boards don't encounter problems; I am aware of only one such report:
http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/vnf4ultra/8.html
Follow the link near the bottom of the page. Note that the VNF4 review date is later than the 6.53 driver release date (and the reviewer says the fix is not available to the public) so this problem found in January has not had the fix released in mid June...
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