Patrick Vervoorn wrote:

In article <4738c772$1@news2.actrix.gen.nz>,
~misfit~ <misfitnz@yahoot.com.au> wrote:

Patrick Vervoorn wrote:

Finally turned out the Seagte HD I had in the system didn't support
Native Command Queueing, while the NVidia SATA drivers did. Swapping
out the Seagate for a WDC RAID edition drive solved this, finally.

Surely you could have just disabled NCQ until such time as you had a
SATA II HDD? Buying a new HDD seems a little extreme as far as
solving the problem goes. There should be an option for
backward-compatability with older, SATA I drives.

It was a  totally new system, so the shop I bought it from exchanged
the Seagate 300GB for a WDC 300GB RAID edition drive with no
questions asked.

That's goof then

It simply took a while before I figured out it was NCQ that was
messing things up; I first noticed the system had no problems when I
used the standard Microsoft IDE drivers. Then made a Ghost image of
that state. Then started experimenting around with installing NVidia
drivers, etc, until I found out I could get the system stable with
the NVidia SATA drivers installed, but by manually disabling NCQ.

However, since I fully expected NCQ to work, and the shop agreed with
me, they suggested I'd try a WDC drive. That one worked flawlessly,
so I later returned the Seagate drive to them.

I have Seagate SATA II drives and don't seem to be able to enable NCQ. In my 
BIOS, the only thing I can find remotely resembling it is Advanced Host 
Controller Interface (AHCI). The manual says, if selected, it "allows the 
onboard storage driver to enable advanced serial ATA features by allowing 
thew drive to internally optimise the order of commands".

However, when I set it to 'enabled' it doesn't recognise any drives. I must 
play some more.

[Crysis]

Something my mother told me, don't be seduced by looks alone. <g>

I'd have to see what the gameplay was like as well.

Gameplay is wonderful. Although it's still on rails (as most single
player games are), the 'arenas' are so expanded, that you have a lot
of choice on how to approach a certain problem/nasty situation.

Ok, I'll try the demo soon.

You _are_ running a Glide Wrapper? I recently had to switch back to
the Direct3D API for Diablo II, when the NVidia 169.01 and 169.04
broke the OpenGL stuff in such a way that the Glide Wrapper stopped
working. I found the Direct3D version of the game to feel much, much
'clunkier' than the game in Glide. Difficult to describe, but
everything seemed to run/animate/move much 'coarser'... So if you
haven't already....?

Twice I've been prompted to try Sven's Glide Wrapper, usually due to
your mentioning it. However, I've never had it work for me for some
reason. Perhaps if I try again....

Perhaps try an older version if the newest one isn't working for you.
I'm running the 1.3 version on one system (P4-1700/Ti4200), while I'm
using the latest 1.4 on the Q6600/8800GTX system.

I haven't tried it on this machine (I've only had it about a week). 
Something else on the "to do" list, along with install all my programs. :-)

Also keep an eye on the NVidia drivers you're using. The latest WHQL
ones work fine, the 169.0x betas had major problems.

Ok, thanks for the heads up.

Oh, BTW, I'm running SETI again. CPU is running at 3.3GHz and SETI at 100%. 
Core temps sit around 43�C constantly. I'm comfortable with that. When BOINC 
started it benchmarked the CPU. 3180 floating point MIPs (Whetstone) per CPU 
and 7128 integer MIPs (Dhrystone) per CPU. That's quite a bit higher than it 
was before I overclocked it.
-- 
Cheers,
Shaun.