Help! New to AMD/nForce & getting an Asus A8N-Sli Premium mboard.

Hi:

I’ll soon be ordering an Asus A8N-SLi Premium mboard. Just waiting on some other gear to be available.

I have been an Intel user in the past, new to AMD/nForce and also the use of on-board audio.

With Intel you just installed the chipset/software from the Asus disc and other than the occasional BIOS flash, you didn’t have to do much.
Usually the Intel chipset/IDE drivers etc were better left alone.

I may be mistaken but the drill with this new mboard seems to be different in that whatever you get on the disc is outdated and is a “just to get you started” affair.

Am I supposed to be dependent on nForce and maybe also Realtek for drivers and expected to keep current with their stuff?

I see that there are even drivers (software) available for the CPU. Amdcpu.exe
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_13118,00.html

Would it be best to burn the latest AMD and Asus utilities, nForce and Realtek driver versions to a disc and install them that way after a clean XP SP2 Pro install?

Also my boot drive will be a SATAII/3GB HDD in non-RAID. Is the F6/FDD SATA driver load required during the O/S install for this mboard?

MS WinXP Pro SP2 clean
AMD ATHLON 64 X2 4800+ PIB
4GB (2 x 2GB kits) OCZ Dual Channel EL DDR PC-3200 400MHz Titanium CL 2-3-2-5
2 x Hitachi Deskstar 500GB 7K500 SATA-II 3.0 Gb/s 7200RPM 16 MB Buffer
Plextor PX-716AL Double/Dual DVD±R/RW CD-R/RW internal E-IDE slot load
ATI RADEON X850 XT PE PCI-E 256MB video card
Antec P180 case (w/extra 120mm front fan)
Antec Phantom 500 500WPSU
Etc

Help with any/all of the above much appreciated,

 

everything has become much easier,"it almost takes the fun out of it",basically you wanna start your install with your xp disk,when it asks for the 3rd party driver insert your floppy,follow onscreen prompts,the drive should "in theory"then be seen by windows,setup partition,yada,yada,yada and windows is installed.

for a clean set of chipdet drivers from there you can use asus'a live update utility,this should be on the disk or at asus's site,which will install all the drivers you select and flash your bios aswell,there should be a realtek audio driver on windows,but if there aint one should be able to be installed with the update tool,or there will be one on asus's site.