n/force 2 chipset question?

Question

i have just re-installed windows xp on a system with no problems,and i have found out it has a n-force 2 motherboard
i am using the p.c with no problems ,so what will i gain by installing the nforce 2 mainboard drivers.
is it nessecary or can i survive without them,
i have found the drivers and downloaded them so they are ready to install if needed

i am using a radeon 9250 (pci bus...128mb),but i also have 2 agp cards 1)g/force 4 mmx 64mb 2)g/force 4 mmx 128mb whats the best card to use

Answer 1

strictly speaking you don't need the nvidia drivers - windows XP copes quite well with the standard drivers. The n-force drivers will generally allow you - more colours, more screen resolution options, better accelerated performance tailored to your specific chip-set (the n-vidia chip is a processor in its own right and likes to be presented with data in its own specific way to run fast)

Answer 2

They will install the nvidia 3rd party IDE drivers which speed up ide performance slightly.
They also will contain drivers and utilities for any onboard sound that the board has and any nvidia networking devices that are onboard.

More importantly, they also include the AGP driver which without you may get poor performance in games, the smbus driver which allows you to recieve motherboard information such as cpu temperature and installed components, the memory controler driver and the gart driver (this affects 3d performance too).

I would recomend that you install the drivers, the IDE driver is not necessary and I have never seen a noticable improvement from using it. You can also skip the utilities if you won't be using them.