I just installed windows 7 on my PIII coppermine without any problem, and the performance checking tool (WinSAT) works, giving me shit ratings 🤣 I'm using an IDE/SATA adapter connected to an SSD drive.

I'm not sure about SSE2 requirements for nvidia drivers, some people had issues with old cpus : https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/3612 … r-sse-problems/

I saw another page yesterday about SSE2 and nvidia control panel but cant find that page anymore 😒

okenido wrote:

I just installed windows 7 on my PIII coppermine without any problem, and the performance checking tool (WinSAT) works, giving me shit ratings 🤣 I'm using an IDE/SATA adapter connected to an SSD drive.

I'm not sure about SSE2 requirements for nvidia drivers, some people had issues with old cpus : https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/3612 … r-sse-problems/

I saw another page yesterday about SSE2 and nvidia control panel but cant find that page anymore 😒

I'm not sure about your configuration but after some further tests I find that the DBInstaller of the most recent drivers (since nVidia R331) definitely doesn't cope well with early CPUs on Windows Vista/7, if you're using a modern PCI GeForce (like GT 430/520/610) and tries to install a recent version of driver. It's strange, though, that under Windows XP, everything including DBInstaller works even up to the last version, 368.81.

If you're using an AGP GeForce the last of those would be a 7950 GT whose last driver is version 307.83, which is unlikely to have issues. I haven't tested ATI drivers since I don't have any modern PCI ATI cards (my board doesn't have AGP slots, only PCI-X slots which are used by my LSI SAS/SATA cards for my drives).

I tried again with Windows Vista and the result was similar though a bit better. The latest Vista driver (365.19) fails with a DBInstaller crash just like on Windows 7, the worse part is that the driver 314.22 which was installable on Windows 7 fails on Vista with a DrvInst crash pointing at nvapi.dll_unloaded. The earliest driver for my GT 610, 301.42, installed without issues and somehow everything works, including nVidia Control Panel. The DWM didn't crash on Vista like Windows 7 and I could enable Aero without problems as well. The performance under Vista is fairly acceptable with Aero enabled as far as I've tested. I'm not certain about other parts, since WinSAT again didn't work under Vista, so I suspect it's my board (Supermicro P3TDL3) having issues with it.

At least with Windows Vista things can be considered usable, although Vista's support ended this April and probably some software devs might have dropped support for Vista as well. Will test whether under Vista the video card can be made full use of.

Sounds a lot like a driver issue somewhere.
I would do the tried and tested method of stripping the PC back to basics, then adding 1 device at a time, I would also try different graphics card if possible. maybe bit of hardware doesn't want to play with something else in Win7, but it is strange XP is happy, although preferable to have XP working then 7 I suppose!

All I have to input are more questions for investigation.

Your hard drives are faster than your memory. How does win7 like that?
Is the 610GT native PCI or using a bridge chip? And is that bridge chip transparent to the system or is it part of the driver stack for that card?
Has anyone heard of using PCIe to PCI adapter brackets working in builds like this? Sorry I don't know enough about these layers.

edit: heh, I was thinking geforce 6, not 600. Forgot every brand looped over since! It is probably bridged by some asic.

Auzner wrote:

All I have to input are more questions for investigation. […]
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All I have to input are more questions for investigation.

Your hard drives are faster than your memory. How does win7 like that?
Is the 610GT native PCI or using a bridge chip? And is that bridge chip transparent to the system or is it part of the driver stack for that card?
Has anyone heard of using PCIe to PCI adapter brackets working in builds like this? Sorry I don't know enough about these layers.

edit: heh, I was thinking geforce 6, not 600. Forgot every brand looped over since! It is probably bridged by some asic.

The board I'm running (Supermicro P3TDL3) has two 3.3V PCI-X slots that can be used to add some SATA-II SAS cards, like the ones I use, LSI SAS3041XL-S. Those cards perform nicely and can offer full SATA-II speed (300MB/s) on those PCI-X slots for my SSD, and are natively supported under Windows Vista and Windows 7 (though I still need to manually provide drivers for XP during text mode install). The only problem is that back then I had to seat it very firmly to get them working (or it'll report MPT BIOS faults and would refuse to function).

And about the video card... Yes, the GT610 is indeed bridged using a PCI-e to PCI bridge chip (same for some other entry-level PCI CUDA cards since GeForce 8400GS PCI) and it does work with this board. Having a PCIe-to-PCI bridge chip does have some restrictions though, as when I first tried it on an old 440BX-based board it would not function. So far with Windows Vista and the known good 301.42 driver everything seems fine on the current board.

Now the problems lie in what could actually interfere with WinSAT and some other stuffs as the crashes look rather unusual yet not random. I'm also having issues with WinSAT on another rig based on the 865G-powered IMB200 motherboard, but less severe. On that board, the WinSAT would complete, but for some reason the program fails to save the final result (which would end up as the Windows Experience Index) according to the log, and after Googling about it, most of such problems were solved by updating the BIOS... which looks strange as unless DSDT or SMI were involved it's unlikely that the BIOS itself would interfere with a program's execution under Windows, although WinSAT appears to be a C++ program.