Via Hyperion 5.11a hates Abit AV8-3rd Eye 17th February 2007

So the title is a bit over dramatic but it got your attention didn’t it ? I recently did a Windows Update to receive this months bounty from Microsoft. Along with the usual bunch of security fixes and updates there were two hardware updates. One of them, which I chose to install was entitled “Via Bus Master Controller” which turned out to be a total screw up which luckily I was able to fix.

Everything seemed to go ok but after a reboot both the primary and secondary IDE channels where showing exclamation marks in Device Manager and they both complained that their new drivers could not be loaded. Since there is no uninstall option for this particular MS update I manually rolled back to the originals and figured everything would be ok. Nope. Even though the Bus Master IDE controller had been rolled back it was still showing the same version as after the MS update. To make matters worse the system was being all laggy. It would run fine and then all of the sudden it would totally crawl. Then it would return to normal. This kept re-occuring which left it pretty unusable. I thought I’d install the latest Via Hyperion drivers to rectify the issue. These happened to be the Hyperion 5.11a drivers. These made absolutely no difference to the lag issues but did introduce a crackling out of my speakers that was really annoying.

On a sidenote I’m using a Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Gamer Fatal1ty Pro sound card which after some googling turned up a ton of results of other people with the crackling/popping sound issue. None of them had a fix which left me pretty un-nerved. Then I thought “well it didn’t do that to me before” so I endeavoured to return my system back to it’s previous state.

The first thing I did was to try doing an uninstall of the 5.11a drivers. To do this you have to run the setup program again and then “Uninstall” is listed as one of the options. There is no start menu link to uninstal and it doesn’t show up in the Add/Remove dialogue. After the uninstall I rebooted. It seemed to of gone smoothly, a little too smoothly…

I checked the driver version numbers of the currently installed drivers and lo and behold the system was still using the 5.11a drivers. Grrrr! The fix to this was pretty simple.

Head over to Guru 3D and navigate to their Via chipset downloads section. I downloaded the 5.10a Hyperion drivers. Once you have those unzip them into a temp folder. At this point I thought I’d be lazy and try the setup program. It would install the AGP driver and Machine INF file but then it crapped out saying that it had been interrupted and refused to install the rest of the drivers. The trick to getting around this was to go into device manager and manually install the drivers.

Device Manager -> SCSI and RAID controllers -> VIA SATA RAID Controller -> Properties -> Driver -> Update Driver -> Install from a list or a specific location -> Don’t search. I will choose the driver to install -> Browse to the folder and install.

The folder location is like this:

C:\FOLDER YOU UNZIPPED TO\VIA_HYPERIONPRO_V510A\VIA_HYPERIONPRO_V510A\VIARAID\DRIVER\WINXP

Then it was a matter of doing the same with the Bus Master IDE Controller under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers and the CPU to AGP Controller under System devices.

After those three where re-installed and I’d verified the version numbers I restarted.

Welcome back to the world of sanity. Everything works as expected, no more stuttering and no more snap crackle n pop in my speakers. The morale of the story is the age old “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. An additional morale is “Stop doing hardware driver updates from the Microsoft site” as they always tend to be proper shit and require hours of manual fixing afterwards.