What does a System Management Controller do?

Glaucus

n00b
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Jan 31, 2009
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I was looking through my device list earlier and I noticed that one of my items there, the 'NVIDIA nForce System Management Controller', had an exclamation. I went into it's properties and apparently I don't have a driver for it. What does this do and where can I find the driver for it?

I have already looked through NVIDIA's site without much luck. Any help will be appreciated. :)

Here are my specs.

AMD Phenom 9850 2.5GHz Quad-Core
ASUS M3N-HD/HDMI
4GB G.Skill DDR2 800
EVGA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB 256-bit
SIGMA SHARK SP-635 635W ATX12V V2.01
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s
Windows Vista 64
 
Probably the same concept as the SMBus driver for Intel chipsets. I'd say look for such a driver (anything that says "smbus" or related) and that might help, but for Nvidia chipsets of course.
 
Do you have the nvidia drivers installed?

nvidia is usually great with drivers...they are all in the one installer for almost all their cards.
 
I wouldn't touch an Nvidia chipset if God himself asked me to use it... so no, I don't have the drivers, sorry. :)
 
Hmm... I believe I am going to need another opinion .

There's a chipset driver for my motherboard's nForce 750a on the NVIDIA site... However, on the Asus site they too have a chipset driver download called 'NVIDIA nForce MCP72/78 Chipset Package Driver V18.12'. I have the later driver installed.

I am wondering if it would be wise to install the chipset driver from the NVIDIA or not. I don't have too much experience in dealing with chipsets so, that's why I'm asking.
 
Pull up Device Manager, bring up the device that is missing the driver, look at its properties, change to the Device ID or Hardware IDs drop down item and get the Vendor ID and the Device ID (might even check for a "Matching device ID" which is shown in Windows 7 now.

The format of a PCI ID string is like this:

pci\ven_10de&dev_0611blahblablah (this is from my Nvidia GeForce 8800GT, by the way)

The Vendor ID is the 4 digit hex code after ven_, Device ID is the 4 digit hex code after dev_, but you could figure that out, right? :)

So in my example, 10de or 10DE is my Vendor ID, 0611 is the Device ID, upper case lower case, same thing.

Once you get the 4 digit codes for each, go to:

www.pcidatabase.com

and put 'em in and do a search. That'll give you either a) the specific device itself or b) the general class/manufacturer of the device, which then makes it easier to figure out which driver you need to see about installing and from whom.
 
All right, thanks for that website Joe, that will help me out with a few other things. :)

I'm going to stick with the drivers from the NVIDIA site. Though, is there any specific process that requires uninstalling what drivers are already there? Or will new chipset drivers simply overwrite one another in a nice, easy, awesome manner?
 
They should overwrite and replace older files with newer ones, of course. No guarantees but that's how it should work, yep.
 
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