Windows Vista Incompatibility
Nvidia announced before the public release of Windows Vista that they would not release chipset drivers for the AGP-based nForce2 for the operating system. They subsequently decided to also drop support for nForce3 in late February 2007, after the release of Vista. Nvidia is thus the only major mainboard chipset manufacturer that is not supporting a chipset designed for 64-bit processors with Vista. The chipset drivers packaged with Windows Vista are usable, but as a result of not being specifically designed for the nForce2 and 3 chipsets, they do not take full advantage of the hardware and lose some functionality. One such problem disables safe removal of IDE and SATA drives.
One issue concerning the lack of natively supported drivers for the nForce3 chipset in Windows Vista has come up with the public release of the operating system and the affordability of dual core systems. In these dual core systems with ATI graphics chipsets above the Radeon 9XXX series, Windows Vista disables the ATI display drivers designed for the operating system and defaults to the PCI-compatible drivers. Windows reports this as Code 43 Error. In PCI-compatible mode, all hardware acceleration is switched off, negatively affecting the performance of the display adapter.
This problem is caused by memory allocation routines in dual core systems with ATI display drivers. With single core processors, this issue does not exist. ATI has claimed Nvidia's chipset driver is the issue. AMD has released announcement about the matter in knowledge base entry #737-24498. SiS, ULi and VIA also had problems with their chipset drivers (mainly agp.inf), but quickly released patches to correct these issues.
As recently reported, Nvidia seems to have changed their minds about not providing an update for the problem and are now saying that the problem will most likely be resolved with an "MCP driver update."
To date, Nvidia has not released a complete chipset driver package for nForce3 and Windows Vista. However, Nvidia has posted individual 32 bit pre-release networking and audio drivers for Windows Vista Beta 1 that support the nForce3 series (and 64 bit). It is also possible that nForce4 chipsets may experience similar problems with the RAID and ATA drivers.
Even using nforce3 with an Nvidia card causes it to only negotiate AGP 4x not 8x, and causes the system to restart repeatedly. There are however workarounds allowing the use of the Windows XP 32bit nForce3 GART driver under Vista 32bit, allowing use of AGP8x, and providing a more stable system. The method is described in this forum thread.
The same workaround exists for Vista x64 users via the Windows XP 64bit nForce3 Beta GART driver. The driver is located here. This driver is not signed so in order to boot the system, you will have to Disable Driver Signature Enforcement at the boot menu or install Readydriver Plus to do it automatically.
Nvidia offers chipset driver download in the "Legacy" product category on its download page.
Read more about this topic: NForce3
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