NForce4 (AMD) Owners - A Few Questions...

[Diplo]

A few quick questions, if I may (since I'm considering upgrading to this platform soon):

1. Do you use the Nvidia reference motherboard drivers or the ones from your motherboard manufacturer?
2. If you use Nvidia drivers have you installed the IDE driver? Has it caused any problems?
3. Is the built in Firewall as bad as people say?
4. Do you need to do the "F6 trick" to install SATA drivers when installing XP onto a single (non-RAID) sata drive?
5. I've heard about CPU drivers and XP patches for dual core processors. What's that all about? Are they needed and what do they do?
6. How good/bad is the Realtek ALC850 inbuilt sound? Is it comparable to NForce 2 'SoundStorm' or is it considerably worse? Do you use Realtek driver or Nvidia driver?
7. Anything else you would like to add?

Thank you for your time, chaps!

 

[Moloch]

A few quick questions, if I may (since I'm considering upgrading to this platform soon):

1. Do you use the Nvidia reference motherboard drivers or the ones from your motherboard manufacturer?
2. If you use Nvidia drivers have you installed the IDE driver? Has it caused any problems?
3. Is the built in Firewall as bad as people say?
4. Do you need to do the "F6 trick" to install SATA drivers when installing XP onto a single (non-RAID) sata drive?
5. I've heard about CPU drivers and XP patches for dual core processors. What's that all about? Are they needed and what do they do?
6. How good/bad is the Realtek ALC850 inbuilt sound? Is it comparable to NForce 2 'SoundStorm' or is it considerably worse? Do you use Realtek driver or Nvidia driver?
7. Anything else you would like to add?

Thank you for your time, chaps!

1. nvidias of course
2. Installed nvidia IDE driver no trouble.
3. Wouldn't know, I have a router for those purposes.
5 no
6. Apparently it takes up to 10% performance, as for quality I only have logitech 5300 5.1 and can't tell a difference between soundstorm and the ALC850.
I did try my old fortissimo 3 which is an excellent card but the drivers are a few years old and didn't wor in serious sam 2k so I went back to onboard sound.
When /if I get an audigy4 I'll get to back to you.
I use nvidias drivers aso.

I would like to add that amd roxers my boxers
I've had mixed results overclocking with my msi neo4-f and a 3200+ winchester.
It has trouble posting above like 210 HTT but in windows I can overclocking much higher, not sure why.
Also get some good ram too and of course a good PSU to go with a quality case.

 

[MasterBaiter]

1. Yes
2. No
3. Well I don't use it, but I've seen a ton of people complain about it.
4. Going off of memory here... I do not think you need to hit F6 (it just uses the Microsoft IDE driver for install as default driver)
5. Related to cpu throttling do some look'in:http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_9706,00.html
6. Comparing the Realtek ALC850 to the SoundStorm would be like comparing balony with filet mignon. Just my humble opinion though.
7. Pirates are better than ninjas, and caek is better than pie!

 

[Tim Murray]

Do you need to do the "F6 trick" to install SATA drivers when installing XP onto a single (non-RAID) sata drive?

So I built a friend's computer earlier this week. Asus A8N-SLI, X2 3800+, 7800GT with Zalman cooler, 2GB of RAM, etc. We install using the F6 trick. It installs, reboots to start up for the first time, and bam. BSOD. I try safe mode. Bam. BSOD. I go into recovery mode to try to run chkdsk after using F6 trick on install CD. Hangs. I'm thinking, "Jesus Christ, it's the hard drive. Fuck fuck fuck." For shits and giggles, I put in the XP Pro 64-bit CD (when you buy WinXP from CMU for $15, you get XP Pro and XP 64. Two separate keys. Best deal in history.). No F6 trick here, just wanted to see if it'd do anything. And lo and behold, it gets detected. I reboot with the XP Pro CD, don't do F6, reinstall, and it works perfectly.

400GB WD SATA drive.

 

[trinibwoy]

1. Yes
2. Yes. No.
3. N/A
4. Not with SP2 slipstream install CD. Yes for original CD.
5. N/A
6. N/A

 

[Sxotty]

It seems you have enough info now, but what the hey
1) Yes
2) I don't use it don't know
3) I thought you did, I did not know SP2 got rid of it cool
4)dunno
5) I don't use onboard sound on nf4 b/c I think it is significantly worse
6) Try to get a good brand, or maybe like one of those cheap ECS sli boards, they seem to have good reviews though overclocking would be poor.

Baron, perhaps it was actually your floppy. The floppy that came with my nf4 board was corrupted YAY! so i had to download the SATA drivers and make a new diskette...

 

[Tim Murray]

Baron, perhaps it was actually your floppy. The floppy that came with my nf4 board was corrupted YAY! so i had to download the SATA drivers and make a new diskette...

Had to make a floppy--drivers were on a CD. Used two floppy disks and drivers from CD and online.

 

[Frank]

3. Yes, it generated lots of Blue Screens.
4. No, but if you do use them: Make an array, and CLEAR it with the RAID BIOS. Otherwise Windows will keep on going down all the time. Oh, and you have to install the IDE driver first, and the RAID driver second from floppy with F6 if you do use it, otherwise it won't work well either.

 

[Snyder]

A few quick questions, if I may (since I'm considering upgrading to this platform soon):

1. Do you use the Nvidia reference motherboard drivers or the ones from your motherboard manufacturer?
2. If you use Nvidia drivers have you installed the IDE driver? Has it caused any problems?
3. Is the built in Firewall as bad as people say?
4. Do you need to do the "F6 trick" to install SATA drivers when installing XP onto a single (non-RAID) sata drive?
5. I've heard about CPU drivers and XP patches for dual core processors. What's that all about? Are they needed and what do they do?
6. How good/bad is the Realtek ALC850 inbuilt sound? Is it comparable to NForce 2 'SoundStorm' or is it considerably worse? Do you use Realtek driver or Nvidia driver?
7. Anything else you would like to add?

Thank you for your time, chaps!

1. Nvidia
2. No and N/A.
3. Yes. Not a single download >300k was ok as long as ActiveArmor was turned on. What a pathetic POS.
4. I don't hava SATA drives, so N/A.
5. At the moment, I have C'n'Q turned off, so the patches aren't neccessary for me.
6. The SoundStorm DSP is definitely better when it comes to CPU usage. Audio Quality is soso, but I guess it's at least not worse than the old AL650 found on most nForce2 boards. The SigmaTel chip on my old A7N266-C was definitely better (better chip AND located on daughter board, not on mainboard), but it's not found on many boards.
7. Be aware that if you wish to build a relatively quiet system, chipset fans can become quite annoying.

 

[Tahir2]

1. Do you use the Nvidia reference motherboard drivers or the ones from your motherboard manufacturer?
2. If you use Nvidia drivers have you installed the IDE driver? Has it caused any problems?
3. Is the built in Firewall as bad as people say?
4. Do you need to do the "F6 trick" to install SATA drivers when installing XP onto a single (non-RAID) sata drive?
5. I've heard about CPU drivers and XP patches for dual core processors. What's that all about? Are they needed and what do they do?
6. How good/bad is the Realtek ALC850 inbuilt sound? Is it comparable to NForce 2 'SoundStorm' or is it considerably worse? Do you use Realtek driver or Nvidia driver?
7. Anything else you would like to add?

Thank you for your time, chaps!

I have a system at home and have built hundreds of systems using the NVIDIA NF4 motherboards in various systems.

1. NVIDIA reference drivers as all motherboard drivers are the NVIDIA reference drivers on every single board I have used (not always the case for Graphics drivers).

2. I prefer not to use the NVIDIA IDE driver, but the latest drivers where I have experimented have not caused problems. There is not much performance difference and HDD's are too slow by order of magnitudes so it doesnt really have any meaningful impact on system performance. My advice do not install the NVIDIA IDE drivers.

3. The built in firewall causes problems with certain programs and I never install it on customer PC's as it is not intuitive to use and still has bugs.

4. No F6 trick needed if you use the correct SATA ports on your motherboard (i.e. the NVIDIA SATA ports). Make sure NVRAID is switched off in the BIOS.

5. CPU drivers give software support for Cool and Quiet (dynamic underclocking to save power). No idea on the dual core drivers specifically for Windows - never has caused an issue but I may look into it.

6. The onboard sound solution is subjective in quality - some people have no issues with it but others experience hissing or poor quality at high volume. The solution is not as good as Soundstorm but Soundstorm only had Dolby Digital encoding over other solutions.

The problem with all onboard sound solutions is that they share PCB space with lots of other electrical signals and this causes a drop in quality as well as the fact that poor quality DAC's are used in almost all onboard sound solutions. There is only one fix for this and it is a discrete soundcard. I would advice leaving the onboard sound and if you don't like it to upgrade at a later stage.

I personally use an NF4 motherboard and Philips Acoustic Edge.

 

[Altcon]

I always use Nvidia Reference drivers, and install the IDE driver with no issues thus far.
I tried the Nvidis firewall software and I think it sucks, or at the least is very badly planned.
I steer away from it and use other software firewalls (mainly sygate to this day).
My board did not require adding sata/raid drivers at install and recognised my Sata drive immediately, when connected to the Nforce 4 SataII controllers (not the silicon image ones on my board).
The onboard sound plainly sucks if you have a slightly musical ear, sounds are flat, not distorted or such but plain flat.
I installed a dual core CPU for a client and all that was needed was a Bios update, I did not play around with the machine much, so I can't really testify to long term use.
I would recommend you check out the chipset cooling on the board since those seem tricky and noisy these days (unless passive), and get a soundblaster of some sort with the mobo.
Overall a pretty solid experience (till last week when I rma'd it...).
I would still recommend it, from all of the Nforce 4 boards I've installed I have yet to hear a customer complain...