Patrick Vervoorn wrote:

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'. :)

No, I meant to say that! <g>

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'. ;)

I actually have a couple PC hardware stores where I get goof deals. One guy 
always works out his "best price" after I tell him what I want, always 
saving a few bucks. He also just gives me small things I want like if I ask 
for a couple SATA cables, or a USB2 backplate. Another shop msaid I was 
buying so much stuff they've given me dealer prices, only ~3% off but still 
better than nothing. I buy so much gear as I'm always upgrading friends 
equipment for 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.

Oh.

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.

Hmmm. This board has Intel's ICH9R southbridge which has 6 SATA II 
connectors and supports RAID. There is also a JMicron SATA II chip that has 
two eSATA connectors on the backplane and also supports RAID. However, I 
can't find anything in the drivers where I can switch on NCQ. Nothing 
through Device Manager and nothing under the Start menu. Perhaps more 
research is required.

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...

It does!! I'm using 14a and it works just fine. The FPS with a skellimancer 
and full army hovers around 58 - 60 during Shenk's Death animation. I'm 
impressed. Also, it's a lot easier to see the difference between the colour 
of rare and unique items. Thanks for giving me a nudge to do this. :-)

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.

Ok, I was hoping for figures to give me some idea. It's just a shame I've 
only got two cores. <g>
-- 
Cheers,
Shaun.