Nvidia on C51 recall

[KimB]

My point is simple: if installing the chipset's drivers causes data corruption on IDE hard disks (I have 3) then I'm not going to invite that trouble by buying such a shoddy product. As chipset flaws go, data corruption is right up there.

Well, I've been using nForce drivers for a long time now, and I've never seen data corruption due to them (though I have seen it occur due to a Windows 2000 formatting bug with hard drives greater than 138GB in size, an issue that was fixed by carefully reformatting with the proper windows updates).

Anyway, I'd really like to see some evidence of actual data corruption issues that people have been reporting with nForce hardware, because I haven't actually seen any.

Edit: Just did a search of the nvnews forums, and found no evidence of IDE data corruption issues.

 

[Sxotty]

Anyway, I'd really like to see some evidence of actual data corruption issues that people have been reporting with nForce hardware, because I haven't actually seen any.

Edit: Just did a search of the nvnews forums, and found no evidence of IDE data corruption issues.

Such an issue does not exist. It only existed in the early days of the nforce 2 and therefore in the nforce1. Even then it was relatively rare and that is why the nforce2 came out before they had it totally fixed.

I actually know people that used the nforce 1 since it came out and are still using the old drivers and have not corruption issues.

 

[Jawed]

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=2972&st=0

Including one guy who seems to have found that an old IDE cable was the cause of his problems

Jawed

 

[Sxotty]

So i tried the 5.10 again, which is apparently the good driver for an NF3. My PC started correctly for more than a week now. I did a fresh install and everything goes fine.
For testing purpose i tried the raid/ide driver from MSI site (which ist from the 6.37) and the problem was again there !!
So it was a driver issue, or more from me ! The 6 series is definitively for the Nf4 !!

So you have people installing drivers for the Nforce4 on motherboards based on nforce3 and they have problems

So it turns that the problem with the 6.66 drivers not updating the SATA RAID was an ASUS BIOS problem and is solved with the ASUS 1013 BIOS.

Like I said if it were really a problem you would have more than 2 pages don't you think?

I mean look how many pages we have arguing about this bs, surely you would run into a a few more complaints...

 

[Sinistar]

Your right, the problems I and other people have had, is all in our heads. Its just strange that when I do a search for people with the same problem, there seem to be alot of them.

If this was any other company, you guys would be calling them all sorts of names.
Just for the record, this is the last Nvidia motherboard I buy.

 

[Sxotty]

Good, youguys fail to realize I do not care at all what you buy. I hope that whatever you do choose, meets your needs well. In any case I do not deny that there have been persons who have had problems, but that is always true, I have not seen any evidence at all for what the topic stated though.

 

[IgnorancePersonified]

It was fixed with a driver release and windows xp2 you clowns. What is so hard to get about that? That was more than 1 year after I bought the board and relegated it to a gaming only machine. Do you want to drop round and see my coaster collection Sxotty? I'm still burning with the same 2 DVD burners I had on the Asus deluxe v 2 mobo - problem free. I'm still use the same friggin cables because they are quality. Must have been something in the air I take it? No wait - maybe after too many installs I finally got it right? I went back to my Tualatin - Via board for stability until the issue was largely sorted. In my current system I have the same hard disks, ram, p/s, DVD burners, IDE cables, floppy and power cables and haven't had one problem. Not one. obviously I'm bullshitting right?

If you didn't get the problem then more power to you but don't then bury your head up your arse and claim that there are no problems when they have been front paged on tech report and people here are complaining. Why go into bat for a multi national company anyway?

Originally Posted by YeuEmMaiMaiWow, what are you smokin' ? IDE and Ethernet are not optional and neither is a firewall in today's computing environment.

With fans like you supporting them Nvidia will never fail as a company......

If I spend $150+ for a mainboard, I EXPECT the thing to work and the featureset to work as advertised.

Couldn't agree more. I paid $280 little Aussie battlers for my nfarce. I paid $116 for my current board.

 

[Sxotty]

I am not and you are not thinking clearly.

It was not frontpaged on Tech report, he clearly stated he had heard lots of whining but seen no evidence. He asked for people to inform him.



I did not realize now you are whining about your dvd burner not working properly, I thought it was hard drive corruption? Well in any case it sure is nice that you can just change whatever you want when ever you want.

And BTW on the link posted it said it was the fault of ASUS for not having a propoer bios.

Even if your problem was somehow mystically the fault of Nvidia it still was not HDD corruption which is what the article in question and the topic at hand was about.

Maybe you should quit whinging.

Do you want to drop round and see my coaster collection Sxotty?

Hell yeah pay my ticket and I am there.

 

[YeuEmMaiMai]

IDE Drivers are optional and while its not excusable for them to keep releaseing bad or non working drivers, I for one have never seen a performance drop or PIO like access of my HDD. The Network cards work, and the drivers work great. The problem is with the Firewall install that it asks you about when you install the drivers (which you can decline).

Obviously if you want a Firewall then the Nforce4 isn't the chipset for you, sadly you will never find one because they are the only ones trying this. I can understand why people can be bugged over the IDE drivers but when performance (that I have seen) isn't affected when choosing not to install the drivers, I don't really see where the problem is.

IDE drivers are not optional and neither are any other drivers required to make the hardware work as advertised.

Maybe all of the Nforce 4 board makers should state


optional IDE
optional Firewall
optional Ethernet


These features may or may not work but we are gonna charge you anyways

 

[Sinistar]

IDE drivers are not optional and neither are any other drivers required to make the hardware work as advertised.

Maybe all of the Nforce 4 board makers should state


optional IDE
optional Firewall
optional Ethernet


These features may or may not work but we are gonna charge you anyways

 

[KimB]

IDE drivers are not optional and neither are any other drivers required to make the hardware work as advertised.

Yes they are on the nForce. The nForce motherboards have IDE hardware that is compatible with "standard" IDE interfaces. The other drivers are there solely for possible performance improvements.

 

[ChrisRay]

Yup. Nforce boards will work fine with microsofts IDE drivers. Theres really no reason to install the Nforce IDE drivers unless you're looking to gain a few ms on transfer speeds. Personally. I have an Nforce 4 board and I certainly havent had any data corruption on my IDE hard drives.

 

[YeuEmMaiMai]

Yes they are on the nForce. The nForce motherboards have IDE hardware that is compatible with "standard" IDE interfaces. The other drivers are there solely for possible performance improvements.

OK, since you think like that why not use the standard Windows driver for your Video card? what if you were forced to do that. Would you still be saying the driver is optional?

After all you are only installing the display driver for "possible performance improvements"

Give me a break.......

 

[KimB]

OK, since you think like that why not use the standard Windows driver for your Video card? what if you were forced to do that. Would you still be saying the driver is optional?

After all you are only installing the display driver for "possible performance improvements"

Give me a break.......

There's a world of difference. With the windows IDE drivers, you get the exact same functionality as with the nVidia IDE drivers.

And installing the IDE drivers on nVidia hardware is an option on install. I'm not just saying it's optional in the sense that you don't have to install them to get the system to work, I'm saying that the driver installation utility pops up and asks if you want to install them, and comes complete with a dialog box that explains potential issues with installing these drivers.

Me, I've just installed 'em, and haven't had any issues with regard to data corruption.

 

[YeuEmMaiMai]

There's a world of difference. With the windows IDE drivers, you get the exact same functionality as with the nVidia IDE drivers.

And installing the IDE drivers on nVidia hardware is an option on install. I'm not just saying it's optional in the sense that you don't have to install them to get the system to work, I'm saying that the driver installation utility pops up and asks if you want to install them, and comes complete with a dialog box that explains potential issues with installing these drivers.

Me, I've just installed 'em, and haven't had any issues with regard to data corruption.

I know this is extremely hard for you to understand but I'll try once again. When people buy something they have a reasonable expectation that the item in question will work as advertised. Now Nvidia claims they have "X" features suchs as HIGH PERFORMANCE IDE and BUILT IN FIREWALL. So you mean that you cannot use the drivers that give you those features without running the risk that your system will get hosed?

Oh, that's right, you'll defend Nvidia to the end because they are like a god in your eyes.

Word of advice to anyone looking to buy an nforce 4 board you might as well get the one from ECS since it really isn't worth it to pay extra for features that may or may not work.

 

[KimB]

I know this is extremely hard for you to understand but I'll try once again. When people buy something they have a reasonable expectation that the item in question will work as advertised. Now Nvidia claims they have "X" features suchs as HIGH PERFORMANCE IDE and BUILT IN FIREWALL. So you mean that you cannot use the drivers that give you those features without running the risk that your system will get hosed?

I don't believe there have been any reports of systems being "hosed."

The occasional data corruption that a few users have noticed has occured when copying large (muti-GB) files, and apparently hard drive manufacturers have owned up to it being a firmware issue with the hard drive.

The firewall issues were significant, but again only affected a relatively small percentage of users and could be fixed by disabling offloading (or installing a different software firewall).

Anyway, I don't buy that these issues are anything specific to nVidia. Do a google on VIA data corruption or SIS data corruption and you'll get a lot of links as well.

 

[Deathlike2]

The firewall issues were significant, but again only affected a relatively small percentage of users and could be fixed by disabling offloading (or installing a different software firewall).

Using a software firewall defeats the purpose of having the hardware firewall in the mobo.

Do a google on VIA data corruption or SIS data corruption and you'll get a lot of links as well.

I've never had or used a SIS chipset.. so I can't say a thing about it (I have read a few reports of it)...

In the case of VIA, that issue was due to the infamous southbridge.. and that was YEARS ago. I haven't seen many reports of newer chipsets having this issue reoccuring. Comparing that with the reoccuring issues of having a problematic firewall and IDE drivers.. that is almost a no brainer.

 

[KimB]

I don't see how the firewall issues are reoccuring. They were just fixed, and there was only the one product that nVidia released that supported the hardware firewall that this was ever a problem for.

Anyway, I guess you can tell that the firewall really wasn't the reason why I purchased an nForce board in the first place, as I didn't really care about using a software firewall. What I wanted was a PCI Express system for a socket 939 CPU. I had had stability problems in the past with VIA, as well as issues with their drivers. So going for the NF4 was a no-brainer. It has high performance, stability, and all the features I'll ever use.

And I'm happy with it. I never noticed any IDE data corruption due to the chipset drivers (I make use of one SATA and one parallel ATA hard drive), and used the hardware firewall for months without issues (the issues didn't appear until I bought a dual-core CPU). Particularly when one considers that the IDE corruption issues have been attributed to hard disk firmware, and the firewall issues are no more, I don't see any reason not to buy an NF4.

 

[YeuEmMaiMai]

Using a software firewall defeats the purpose of having the hardware firewall in the mobo.



I've never had or used a SIS chipset.. so I can't say a thing about it (I have read a few reports of it)...

In the case of VIA, that issue was due to the infamous southbridge.. and that was YEARS ago. I haven't seen many reports of newer chipsets having this issue reoccuring. Comparing that with the reoccuring issues of having a problematic firewall and IDE drivers.. that is almost a no brainer.

I have used SiS 735,45,46FX and never had problems. SiS has served me well. I was leery at first because of their past performance problems. Once the reviews of the 735 came in it was a no brainer $50 for a ECS board and great performance.

 

[KimB]

I have used SiS 735,45,46FX and never had problems. SiS has served me well. I was leery at first because of their past performance problems. Once the reviews of the 735 came in it was a no brainer $50 for a ECS board and great performance.

And my roommate has a SiS chipset Intel board that has some very annoying problems of its own. Specifically, it takes a few minutes to boot into Windows XP, something my NF4 system does in about 20-30 seconds.