A8N-SLI Premium Setup Question

[blitzen9x]

Greetings...

Just put together a new system and have a question regarding installation of drivers.

Setup is:
Cooler Master Centurion Case
Antec 550W TruePower 2.0 PSU
A8N-SLI Premium - W/ Bios Version 1007 (have not yet flashed to latest bios)
AMD Athlon64 4000+ CPU
1 Gig Corsair Ram
DiamondMax Maxtor 200Gig SATA150 HDD - 16MB Cache
PowerColor X850XT Video (Potential upgrade to dual nVidia SLI Video some day)
Windows XP

I assembled the hardware, HDD is connected to SATA 1; started up, went through the bios, set bios settings to
disable RAID (may use it some day, don't need it for now). Formatted new drive, installed WindowsXP. All
worked well, Windows fired up, no problem. However, I then used the included Asus CD to install nForce4
chipset drivers. After installation of nForce4 chipset drivers, Windows would no longer load completely; when
Windows reached the screen with the WindowsXP logo and bottom progess bar, it would go no further; hard drive
activity ceased. No amount of waiting helped; it was clear it wasn't going to proceed, as it had loaded in
about 4 seconds previous to installing the drivers. Rebooted and chose "last successful" XP startup (reverts
back to before driver installation) then we are back in business, and XP boots fine.

So, my question is, is it necessary to even install these drivers...? Seems to be working without them.
Guess we're running off of WindowsXP drivers. Is there any great benefit to going back and installing the
supplied chipset drivers? If so, how should this be done?

Appreciate any assistance...

 

[Eric Parker]

Greetings...

Just put together a new system and have a question regarding installation of drivers.

Setup is:
Cooler Master Centurion Case
Antec 550W TruePower 2.0 PSU
A8N-SLI Premium - W/ Bios Version 1007 (have not yet flashed to latest bios)
AMD Athlon64 4000+ CPU
1 Gig Corsair Ram
DiamondMax Maxtor 200Gig SATA150 HDD - 16MB Cache
PowerColor X850XT Video (Potential upgrade to dual nVidia SLI Video some day)
Windows XP

I assembled the hardware, HDD is connected to SATA 1; started up,

went through the bios, set bios settings to

disable RAID (may use it some day, don't need it for now). Formatted

new drive, installed WindowsXP. All

worked well, Windows fired up, no problem. However, I then used the

included Asus CD to install nForce4

chipset drivers. After installation of nForce4 chipset drivers,

Windows would no longer load completely; when

Windows reached the screen with the WindowsXP logo and bottom

progess bar, it would go no further; hard drive

activity ceased. No amount of waiting helped; it was clear it

wasn't going to proceed, as it had loaded in

about 4 seconds previous to installing the drivers. Rebooted and

chose "last successful" XP startup (reverts

back to before driver installation) then we are back in business, and XP boots fine.

So, my question is, is it necessary to even install these

drivers...? Seems to be working without them.

Guess we're running off of WindowsXP drivers. Is there any great

benefit to going back and installing the

supplied chipset drivers? If so, how should this be done?

Appreciate any assistance...

I built a couple these 2 months ago but with AMD64 3200+ CPUs
(Venice).
I had to flash to a beta bios at the time (the file is 1009-004.bin)
before they would work properly.

They both were Prime95 stable at 2400 MHz, and no complaints yet.

Eric