How important is NCQ?

[VivienM]

I'm still trying to finalize my Conroe build plans... and now comes the motherboard question.

The Intel DP965LT (http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/dp965lt/index.htm) seems perfect to me:
- I am not planning on overclocking, but do want rock solid stability
- I've been extremely pleased with the amazing stability of my now-4.5-year-old Intel board that this will be replacing
- I don't want fancy on-board audio (planning to stick an X-Fi in) or dual graphics
- the price seems more than decent. (American sites seem to be saying ~$115USD as opposed to $250 for the BadAxe)

However, there's one small issue: it uses the ICH8, instead of ICH8R, which means no NCQ support. Is that NCQ important enough to justify spending $100+ more for a BadAxe or however much the Asus P5B Deluxe WiFi (the basic P5B, like the Intel board, only has the ICH8) will cost when I won't use any of the other features (RAID, higher-end audio, CrossFire, etc)?

(FWIW, I was thinking about going with Seagate 7200.10 for HD...)

 

[stardrek]

NCQ is useful if you will be using those drives to host data that will be shared on a network by several computers. For a single user it doesn't help in basic day to day activity. NCQ is really there for lots of requests for data that would be scattered all over the drive.

NCQ allows for...

"Rather than relying on faster spindle speeds to reduce rotational latency, Native Command Queuing aims to minimize the performance impact of a hard drive's mechanical latency by intelligently re-ordering I/O requests. Normally, a hard drive blindly executes I/O requests in the order that they are received. NCQ allows a drive to gather multiple I/O requests and reschedule them based on their proximity to the drive head's position."

This really helps if there are lots of requests coming to the drive from lots of systems, like a file server on a network.

Link Half way down the page explains NCQ pretty well.

 

[VivienM]

Originally posted by: stardrek
NCQ is useful if you will be using those drives to host data that will be shared on a network by several computers. For a single user it doesn't help in basic day to day activity. NCQ is really there for lots of requests for data that would be scattered all over the drive.

No serious sharing planned. This is supposed to be a Windoze workstation/gaming system... so games, office apps, web browsers, media players, etc.

 

[xtknight]

NCQ certainly isn't worth $100 even if you did have a file server IMO.

 

[Talcite]

NCQ actually slows down single or a few drives. Most enthusiasts actually disable NCQ just to get that extra smidgen of performance.

Disable it unless you're running a 4 or 5+ drive server. Also don't bother spending the extra cash.

I thought ICH8R has support for raid? Cause that'd be worth spending the extra cash for... not NCQ alone though.

 

[VivienM]

Originally posted by: Talcite
I thought ICH8R has support for raid? Cause that'd be worth spending the extra cash for... not NCQ alone though.

Yes, ICH8R has RAID... which I don't see myself as having a particular need for. Or at least, not a $120 need...

 

[Talcite]

ahh... icic =p might as well get a nice promise controller card or something for that price heh. Are you sure those are the only 2 differences in the boards? I'd actually consider the $120 if the asus or whatever had more phase regulators.

 

[VivienM]

Originally posted by: Talcite
ahh... icic =p might as well get a nice promise controller card or something for that price heh. Are you sure those are the only 2 differences in the boards? I'd actually consider the $120 if the asus or whatever had more phase regulators.

There are LOTS of other differences in the boards... none of which matter to me.

e.g. why pay for the Intel 7.1 High Definition Audio thing when I'm going to turn it off in the BIOS and put in an X-Fi anyways?

 

[fire400]

NCQ will make your drive work more efficiently, thus faster system performance. benchmarks show that RAID 0 on two NCQ drives really makes RAID 0 something to consider if you are a performance savvy enthusiast. if you got the money, yeah, you pair it with every other enhancement like dual channel, overclocking, excellent cooling, clean software environment, etc. - and you will notice the difference.

otherwise if you don't have the money for it, don't lose sleep over something like this.

it's like going for a more expensive super silent powersupply and having 6 loud component fans still running in your computer.

do the research, listen to what others have to say about it and ask yourself:

"how much is it worth to you after all the research and opinions you've studied upon?"

 

[VivienM]

Originally posted by: fire400
NCQ will make your drive work more efficiently, thus faster system performance. benchmarks show that RAID 0 on two NCQ drives really makes RAID 0 something to consider if you are a performance savvy enthusiast. if you got the money, yeah, you pair it with every other enhancement like dual channel, overclocking, excellent cooling, clean software environment, etc. - and you will notice the difference.

otherwise if you don't have the money for it, don't lose sleep over something like this.

it's like going for a more expensive super silent powersupply and having 6 loud component fans still running in your computer.

Hmm... well, I have some amount of money, but I have a feeling the $250(CAD) or so that RAID would cost (motherboard + extra drive) would be FAR better spent upgrading from a 7900GT to a GTX, for example?

I'm trying to keep the whole build at roughly around $2000-2100 (CAD), excluding monitor... at that kind of budget, RAID/NCQ, or lower-latency RAM, etc. are unreasonable luxuries, I think?