Asus A7n266-VM IDE question

[edtrip]

I need help with this board.

The system is 950 tbird (100fsb)
256mb pc 2100 (2 x 128mb)
geforce2 gts
20 gb ata100 hd
Win98
and using the onboard audio

In 'device manager' under Hard disk controllers it lists

Primary IDE controller (single fifo)
Secondary IDE controller (single fifo)
Standard dual PCI IDE controller

First question - Why does it say single fifo instead of dual? Every PC i've set at for a couple years now has said dual fifo. Is it bad to be single?

Second question - Shouldn't my IDE controller be something more specific to Nforce than just a standard controller? My kt333 system has a Via bus master IDE controller.

Something seems wrong here to me but all my searching has not led to an answer yet. And I started by using Asus latest drivers for 98, following their install procedure, then tried the unified nforce package from Nvidia.

And the performance of this board is not great. The video in 3d just seems to degrade over time, in the game, not overheating or locking up, but going from fluid to choppy and stuttering.

I ran this cpu and geforce 2 in an older pc with a kt133a mobo with 256mb ram and the performance, in these same games, was a hell of a lot better than with this nforce board - and a lot more stable.

One other thing - even though i have both Dimm slots filled the boot screen says 64-bit memory. I thought it should be 128.

Any help appreciated, thanks.

[Buzioid]

What games are you running? The choppyness could come from lack of ram, try closing some unneeded programs.

[edtrip]

Theres nothing running in the background except the MS sidewinder software for the wheel and the games are not exactly intensive --
Grand prix legends , which caps the max rate at 36 fps, and nascar heat. Both at 1024x 768

and i ran em higher than that with this hardware on a via board.

[skuz]

For the FIFO question, Dual means there are 2 buffers, one for each drive on the channel, single means there is only one buffer (usually larger) shared by both devices on a channel.

This is the way I understood it by my reading.

[thekemp]

newer nforce drivers should sort it out there is an ide driver included with the new ones that enables you to change the transfer rate / dma in device manager

[LeftCoast]

Yo trip,

I've used this board in @ 10 builds, and with a little work it can be a decent, cheap main.

I would flash the bios to the latest version (5, i think), and download/install the latest drivers (uninstall old drivers first, though).

Also, for the heck of it, I'd reset the cmos (remove battery and short out the jcmos jumpers). This board has timing issues that can best be resolved by doing so. This MAY be the issue with your games.

Also, make sure DMA is enabled for ALL drives (PIO is the default on many fresh installs).

-LC