Questions regarding nforce drivers

[Mekrel]

Hi all,

Please excuse me for this long winded post - and at first it may seem to have nothing to do with unattended install but it does in the end.

My current motherboard is a DFI LP 250GB UT which uses the nforce3 250GB chipset, and for ages I have been using the 5.10 drivers but unfortunatly these seem to give me random connection problems with BF2.

So I hunted on guru3d for some more up to date drivers and chose the 6.37 and decided to use a mixture of the 5.10s with the ethernet and gart driver from the 6.37's.

Unfortunatly the 6.37s are not compatable with the ethernet controller and only the nvidia net bus emerator (sp?).

So I decided to carry on trying different mixtures by extracting the .exe's and using device manager but unfortunatly if I found a working ethernet driver then I would get serious performance issues which was confirmed by dropping a 1/3rd of my 3DMark 05 points.

So my 1st question is:

If you uninstall all your nforce drivers and then look in device manager - you only see 3 unknown devices:

1) Other PCI device (this is the ethernet controller/ bus emerator)

2) Audio

3) SM Bus

Now in the nforce installer, there are more drivers which are not shown in the device manager. Such as Mem Controller, IDE and GART.

So does the nforce installer somehow install these differently/forcefully as they are not located in device manager?

This leads to my second question:

So when using the PnP driver path in Winnt.sif will windows deffinatly install all the infs that it comes accross? As I presume that this is kind of an automated device manager kind of thing as you are locating the infs like you would with device manager?

Just I dont wanna use that method if im going to mess up my driver installs.

Ive currently found that using the nforce 5.10 installer and NOT selecting ethernet - and then using device manager to install the ethernet driver from the 6.xx drivers actually works.

Any help much appreciated!

[RickSteele]

My System:

ASUS A8N-SLI Premium, AMD FX-55 Clawhammer processor, ASUS EAX850XT PE 256mb PCIe, Audigy 2 ZS, Sony LCD SDM-HS95PS-DVI, Corsair TwinX1024LL PC3200 Professional, 4*WD 74G Raptors in RAID0 on nforce4 chipset, Lian-Li PC-75 case, 2*LG 4163 DV-RW, Panosonic floppy, Sycom UPS 800va surge supressor.

I used nlite 1.0b5 to integrate SP2, all post SP2 hotfixes, the nforce 6.66 whql drivers, all reg tweaks, removals etc. and then used Bashrat the Sneaky's WMP10 integration-the small program to download is in his forum; and I am writing this reply on a fresh install with no errors; accomplished 3 days ago. Sooo, do not mix the driver packages, the latest ASUS BIOS updates for all nforce4 motherboards will only work with the 6.66 nforce4 driver set-any older cause winXP to hang on shutdown/reboot. The standard answer file I use is attached. First, no need to uninstall; reboot in safe mode and run nforce setup-all will be done automatically. Secondly, during winXP setup you must provide a path to each and every driver folder, including subfolders in the correct order, pointing to each inf as required. Text mode will not search for anything and will quit if all is not perfectly laid out in txtsetup and dosnet-nlite it, much easier.

[Mekrel]

Yes, I know all that

Ive had Unattended CDs for absolutly ages and Ive done it manually and also manually added Oemtxt drivers for my nforce 2 board ages ago...

Yes, if you own a nforce4 board then you have no problem as nVidia (the selfish as****** that they are) still support that chipset, but the latest WHQL drivers for nforce3 are 5.10 which are ancient and the ethernet driver causes bf2 connection problem. There are others but these dont always have support for everything...

Thats why I NEED (I wouldnt want to else) mix the driver package.

The thing which is worrying me is that if you uninstall all the drivers (I know you dont have to) then you get far fewer enteries in Device manager than the amount of drivers which come with the actuall installer.

Im concerned that Pnpdriverspath is just an automated device manager (as both look for .infs within the directories you specify) so that all the drivers wont get installed if I do it this way.

Thanks for your reply, and very nice system you got there except you really need to get a 7800 GTX . Transparancy AA, SM3.0 and WFG 1.0 support. Nice case too, Lian-li and the old CM cases are the best.

Is that the ASUS board with the northbridge heatpipe?