@ all users with a NVIDIA nForce chipset mainboard:
Preliminary notes
Many users with an nForce chipset mainboard, who are running or going to install Vista, Win7, Win8 or Win10 (32/64bit), are searching for nForce chipset drivers, which are suitable for their special chipset and will give them the best possible performance and stability of their system. NVIDIA itself doesn't offer them.
As you probably know, NVIDIA had stopped the development and the production of the nForce chipsets already in springtime 2010. That is why there are no newer nForce chipset driver packs available. Unfortunately many nForce chipset drivers packages, which have been officially released by NVIDIA, have not been optimized for all nForce chipsets they were designed for. Some of them are not even usable with certain nForce chipsets.
That is why I started in January 2008 >this< thread at nForcersHQ Forum, where I was offering some especially optimized nForce driverpacks for Vista (and later for Win7). Since the nForce SATA RAID and -if applicable - the nForce SATA AHCI drivers never have been separately released by NVIDIA and always were part of the nForce chipset driverpacks, I decided to put parts of this nForcersHQ Forum thread into this Forum.
Question: For whom are these driverpacks suitable?
The installation of my driverpacks makes sense for owners of an nForce chipset mainboard, who ran into problems with NVIDIA's official packs (for example NF4 users) or who are searching for a driverpack combination, which gives them a better performance (owners of all NF4-7 series chipsets).
Important:
1. Only my "Actual nForce Driverpacks" are optimized for the advanced AHCI features, which are supported by the latest nForce chipsets from MCP65 up. Users, who want to run their SATA hdd(s) in full "AHCI Mode", but avoid to install any modified driver, may take NVIDIA's official driver sets.
2. All my packages contain the untouched original NVIDIA drivers (that are the files with the extension ".SYS"). The customization of my "modded" driverpacks concerns just the associated text files (with the extension ".INF") to make the original drivers compatible with other nForce chipsets and has no negative impact regarding the function of the drivers (= .SYS files).
3. If you are running the installer of any nForce driverpack, you must not expect, that all nForce drivers of your OS will be updated by the drivers, which are within the set. Maybe the installer will give you just the option to install 1 or 2 of the set drivers. This is absolutely normal and may have one of the followng reasons:
4. a) not all nForce chipsets will need all included drivers of the package (example: nForce4 chipsets don't have any device, which is supported by the SMU driver) or
b) the installer believes, that the OS has already the "best" driver for the related device (not always the truth, but you can always try a forced manual driver update from within the Device Manager by using the "Have Disk..." option)
5. Everything is ok, if you look into the Device Manager and verify, that none of the NVIDIA related devices has a yellow mark.
6. You won't find a NAM folder with NVIDIA's "Network Management Tools" within my packages, because they are useless for nearly everyone and may cause problems. Big advantage: The download is much quicker due to the small package size.
Before you are going to install a new nForce Ethernet driver, you should uninstall the previously running one (exception: the in-box drivers cannot be uninstalled).