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From: Richard on 4 Jul 2010 09:33
In Device Manager I am seeing a yellow alert symbol next to the SM Bus
Controller under "Other Devices". If I right click and select Properties
I am told the driver is not installed. I have searched online but cannot
find anywhere that will tell me exactly what driver I need and how to
get it. I do not have a Windows XP disk (I am Home SP3)and I do not have
a Recovery Console as this was lost in a reformat. Can anyone tell me a)
what is SM Bus controller, and b) under these circumstances,how can I
find ,and where, the right one?
Many thanks.
Richard
From: Rey Santos on 4 Jul 2010 11:55
Chipsets
SMBus controller not detected properly
http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/sb/cs-013541.htm

--
Rey


"Richard" wrote:

> In Device Manager I am seeing a yellow alert symbol next to the SM Bus
> Controller under "Other Devices". If I right click and select Properties
> I am told the driver is not installed. I have searched online but cannot
> find anywhere that will tell me exactly what driver I need and how to
> get it. I do not have a Windows XP disk (I am Home SP3)and I do not have
> a Recovery Console as this was lost in a reformat. Can anyone tell me a)
> what is SM Bus controller, and b) under these circumstances,how can I
> find ,and where, the right one?
> Many thanks.
> Richard
> .
>
From: Richard on 4 Jul 2010 12:27
On 04/07/2010 16:55, Rey Santos wrote:
> Chipsets
> SMBus controller not detected properly
> http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/sb/cs-013541.htm
>
Rey....many thanks for your help, but I realise now I should have said
that I have an AMD Athlon 64 Processor with an MSI Amethyst - M circuit
board (info from Belarc Advisor), which I presume means that Intel
drivers etc won't work. Would you be able to point me to the same page
for this chipset?? I hope I am using the right jargon, and that this is
the reason your link above refused to work. Thank you again.
Richard
From: Paul on 4 Jul 2010 17:29
Richard wrote:

> Hello Paul... I downloaded the 6.82mb .inf file from ECS, which reads
> exactly the same as the one from the larger 331 mb file you quote
> above....and it seems to have worked perfectly!! I have not a clue what
> it does or how important it is, but it no longer shows up with a yellow
> alert or even at all! In fact neither does "Other Devices" under which
> it used to appear. I thank you very much indeed. Like I say, I don't
> know anything about an SM Bus, but the problem has been there a while
> and it is never nice seeing alerts all over the place. How do you find
> these sites? I have searched the various sites using the details I know,
> but could never find a mention of specific SM Bus controllers or
> anything useful other than very general info etc. Anyway very much thank
> you again!.
> Regards, Richard.

The SMBus is a system management bus of sorts. It is an I2C bus,
with serial clock and data. It operates at a very low speed and
talks serially (uses one wire for the data signal, and sends one
bit at a time).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2c

Purely as a joke or to prove a point, one of my buddies at work,
placed a ten foot long extension cord on a bus like that, and the
bus worked perfectly well. He was trying to make the point, that
we weren't stressing its capabilities at all, by making short length
busses. So such wiring scheme are good when you have a bunch of things
separated by relatively large distances. Inside your computer, they
don't really stress the length feature at all.

In times past, you might see a hardware monitor chip connected to
it. That chip would have been used to measure temperatures, fan speeds,
and read out the major voltages in the PC (like the measured values
of the 3.3V, 5V, and 12V rails).

That chip function has been moved to the LPC bus on newer machine.
LPC is a four bit wide bus, which operates much faster, and doesn't
have the same problems as the SMBus does. (You can't have two pieces
of software access the SMBus at the same time, because some genius
forgot to define a semaphore for such a purpose. If two programs
tried to read temperatures at the same time for example, occasionally
corrupt readings would be the result. A software semaphore would
have prevented that. The LPC bus doesn't have the same problem.)

The memory DIMMs in your computer, are connected to the SMBus. The
DIMM has some timing information, which the computer needs. Each DIMM
could have different values recorded in it. There is a small flash
memory chip on each DIMM, and that is what is connected to the SMBus.

If you had some utility that needed to read info from the DIMMs
(like Everest or CPUZ perhaps), then it might actively do a read while the
OS is running. Otherwise, there might not be a lot of activity on
that bus, on a modern system.

At one time, there was potential to connect other kinds of devices
to that bus. There was a header on the motherboard, where you could
run a cable over and connect to the bus. Perhaps something like
a fan speed controller. But that has gone out of favor. Instead,
any "toys" you want to put in a computer, can be connected to USB,
and achieve largely the same results.

If you wanted to test your SMBus, you can download Speedfan and
when you start the Speedfan program, it will probe the SMBus to
see what is on it. So that would be an example of a program
that might use the SMBus, at least long enough for it
to discover there is nothing of interest there.

http://www.almico.com/speedfan440.exe

HTH,
Paul
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