In article <473aca40$1@news2.actrix.gen.nz>,
~misfit~ <misfitnz@yahoot.com.au> wrote:

Patrick Vervoorn wrote:

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

I assume you meant 'good'. :) Yes, that was quite nice of them, but since 
I've bought most of my computer-related hardware from them (including a 
full C2D system for my brother), I fully expected them to be 'nice'. ;)

Anyway, it's owned by a guy who himself also likes to mess around with 
computer hardware, so he knows what can happen.

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.

Be aware the original Seagate drive that I had installed claimed to be a 
SATA-II drive; it was running at 3.0Gbps, and with NCQ manually disabled 
(the NVidia SATA driver properties pages has a check-box for it) they were 
working quite nicely.

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.

I don't think it's a BIOS function, it's a driver function. However, this 
system is the first one with a SATA-interface, so I have no experience 
with, for instance, Intel's driver set.

The board has two extra SATA interface chips, both from Silicon Image. One 
chip has it's own Settings program, but this one is meant for external 
SATA stuff, so I can't experiment with it. From what I can see (all 
options are there, but ghosted out) that might have an NCQ related 
setting.

The other Silicon Image chip drives two on-board SATA connectors, but I 
haven't been able to find any XP drivers for it, so it shows up as a 
'generic' IDE controller, with the default Microsoft drivers, which do not 
support NCQ. As part of my 'problem-finding' I did connect the Seagate 
drive to a port on that chip, and it booted up and worked with no 
problems.

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 won't regret it. ;)

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. :-)

Hopefully it works...

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.

Very nice. I'm not near the Q6600 machine, but I think (from memory) that 
one is around the 2400/6500 mark.

Regards, Patrick.