So is it a 5000X chipset or 3100 chipset - Boot camp?

Question

I read thru some articles that suggest the Intel chipset (that does the SATA side of things) used in the MacPro is a 5000X series. So I downloaded the lastest WinXP drivers for the chipset from Intel's web site and the driver don't install saying they are not correct for the hardware.
So I go into Control Panel and discover the SATA chipset is being listed as the 3100 series.
So which is it? The reason I ask is that I'm getting very poor performance (random access times) from my hard drive under WinXP. Smaller files are killing it -- poor performance in access times, not in actual thru-put -- working with larger files if fine. Considering the drive in question is a 10K Western Digital Raptor driver with 16MB buffer 150GB -- this is not expected.
I know about the Boot Camp 1.1 issue with driver install and SATA but used Boot Camp 1.2 (which fixed this) so the driver was installed with OS during setup.
I've noticed that Intel site shows a driver update for both chipsets (3100 and 5000X) and I would like to get them loaded in WinXP to see if this cures the problem.
I've ran some diagnostic on the drive and there doesn't appear to be anything wrong at a hardware level.
Rob.

Answer 1

WinXP Pro 32bit is on it's own partition -- the drive in question is a Western Digital 10K Raptor 150GB 16MB buffer, SATA.
Boot Camp on my system will on support upto 2GB RAM with the X1900XTX installed. On a standard PC, WinXP 32bit will only support upto 4GB (actually 3.6GB). Only the 64bit flavors of XP or Vista will support more than 4GB.
Vista (any version) is not an option as Visual Studio 2005 has many issues with it (even with the patches).
WinXP and Vista are still pretty much multi-CPU brain dead, the kernel just does NOT do a good job at thread allocation to specific CPUs -- Vista is a big skip in my book (sorta like WinME).
The Microsoft OS that looks promising is "Vienna" which they slipped out as going to Beta in 2008 to be released 2009 (and then back pedal releazing their marketing mistake). The reason for the shorter delivery time for Vienna -- pretty simple, no backwards compatibility, truely from ground up...hmmmm...maybe Apple were right all along
Anyway, back to my Hard Drive issue under Boot Camp -- performance test show the drive as being very fast, but on smaller file sizes it takes a serious noise dive -- medium to large files and it is very speedy. This type of problem is usually a EFI issue (or in the case BIOS emulation) or driver issue or both. Anyone else notice performance issues with smaller file sizes?
The SATA chipset is 3100 series. There is a 5000X series chipset also (don't confuse this with CPU model), but these are not in the MacPro (at least not in my MacPro).
Rob.