I will not be buying, nor recommending that anybody buys any more products from this company.
No doubt many of my readers are aware of my long running battles with the GeForce 5 series on Windows Vista, which eventually made me so fed up I blew £1600 on a new Tablet PC (without any nVidia junk in I might add). nVidia right up to the launch of Windows Vista said they would support the GeForce 5 series on Windows Vista. Then around launch time they quietly retract and say it is no longer supported.
Now these guys have hit me again, with the nForce3 chipset. Unsurprisingly they pulled the exact same stunt, saying all through development and right up to launch that they will support Windows Vista, and then a month after launch, they pull all statements of support from their website. What a joke.
So anyway as I saw Socket 939 dual core chips were going pretty cheap so I replaced the Athlon 64 3200+ in one of my machines with a Athlon 64 X2 4200+, not only would it be a bit faster, with a Manchester core dual channel memory would work too, bargain. Everything worked fine until I arrived on the desktop, noticing the video card was in 2D basic mode. Windows was kind enough to inform me that where was a problem with the hardware and it couldn't start the drivers for my Radeon X850XT.
So I try a few things with no luck and then hit Google. It seems that the nForce3 doesn't work with ATI graphics cards in the AGP slot when using a dual core CPU. Great. So I disable one of the cores and everything works fine. Now this issue goes back to the launch on Windows Vista, the Socket 939 chipsets of the time all used a hack to get dual core CPUs to work, they'd remap the memory address of the AGP card into PCI, this is how they function on Windows XP. SiS and VIA both addressed the problem on their same-generation chipsets within a couple of weeks of the launch of Windows Vista by releasing an updated AGP driver.
Not nVidia though, they recommend you buy an nVidia graphics card or upgrade your motherboard! What a rip, worse still is their lack of support isn't advertised anywhere, boards with nForce3 chipsets are sold claiming compatibility for Windows Vista.
nVidia, get your act together release a damn AGP driver which works properly. No other company kills support for their products so quickly.