Turned off NCQ and now no issues with A8N-SLI

[bneiderman]

Ok, I have a 300 GB Maxline, Athlon 4000+, 1 GB OCZ 3200 Platinum Rev. 2. I am on my freaking 5th or 6th install of Windows XP Professional. I install clean and put in the Forceware Nforce 4 drivers (new ones) and all seems good. Then, no overclocking mind you, I get random lock ups requiring me to reset the computer. Then lo and behold, my boot.ini is corrupt or my boot sector is corrupt. I just tried turning off NCQ and the problems seem to have vanished. At least, no issues so far with all my stuff reinstalled.

I WANT to use NCQ which is part of the reason I waited for the new technology, but I thought these issues were resolved. Am I missing something here? Is anyone else having issues with this combination of board and harddrive? Please, I need some sort of help here!

 

[Promethply]

That's a bit strange -- my NF4 (ASUS A8N-SLI) system has a Seagate 7200.8 300GB HD attached to it, and I can use it with/without NCQ.

 

[ChicagoPCGuy]

Originally posted by: bneiderman
Ok, I have a 300 GB Maxline, Athlon 4000+, 1 GB OCZ 3200 Platinum Rev. 2. I am on my freaking 5th or 6th install of Windows XP Professional. I install clean and put in the Forceware Nforce 4 drivers (new ones) and all seems good. Then, no overclocking mind you, I get random lock ups requiring me to reset the computer. Then lo and behold, my boot.ini is corrupt or my boot sector is corrupt. I just tried turning off NCQ and the problems seem to have vanished. At least, no issues so far with all my stuff reinstalled.

I WANT to use NCQ which is part of the reason I waited for the new technology, but I thought these issues were resolved. Am I missing something here? Is anyone else having issues with this combination of board and harddrive? Please, I need some sort of help here!

NCQ seems to really hate some hardware setups and be fine with others. I am using the 6.53 nForce4 standalone kit, and I have a EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra with a Seagate 7200.8 200Gig harddisk. NCQ works relatively OK, except in Prime95, where the harddisk will thrash for hours while it attempts to do a torture test. I turn off NCQ, and no problems. NCQ does not seem to cause issues elsewhere, but for safety reasons and the fact that NCQ actually benches SLOWER enabled, I turned it off. It has no real merit in desktop usage applications--either no gains or it will slow you down.

I believe NCQ does not get along with your particular harddisk/mobo combination with the latest driver set, but might be OK with 6.39 or 6.37--just overheard static on a number of boards about this, but I cannot cite any threads for you. Of course, if you use 6.39 or 6.37, then NAM might not work right on your setup. But there can be other factors involved as well. What standalone kit are you using, what rev ASUS board do you have, what BIOS are you using.....there are so many variables.

 

[bneiderman]

Thanks for the reply ChicagoPCGuy. I have tried multiple Asus bios' and am currently using the 1008.01 beta. The standalone kit is the newest 6.53 from Nvidia. As far as the Asus revision, I got the A8N-SLI when it first came out. Thanks for any other info.

Oh yeah, I do believe many others have the same config as me due to the popularity of the motherboard and the harddrive and I know there were issues before the 6.53, but no one is talking about them now.

 

[chilled]

The issues seem to be with the Asus NF 4 board. My MSI k8N diamond runs fine with DM10's with NCQ.

Maybe a BIOS update will sort out the kinks someday...

 

[funkwalkr]

i'm sorry to hear that, i have a 300GB diamondmax10 and asus a8n-sli deluxe. i used to have data corruptions as you did when i had NCQ enabled. but recently, i've been able to use NCQ because of the nforce4 standalone 6.53 kit, and i haven't had any data corruptions at all. it's been working with all BIOS versions since 1004 (that i've tested). i thought the maxlineIII and diamondmax10 were the same, so if you've tried the newest drivers and newest BIOS, then maybe it is a harddrive problem?

 

[uOpt]

Could also be buggy drive firmware.

Note that it can still be buggy drive firmware when a new OS driver fixes it, these drivers have huge tables of drives with known issues and then avoid the problematic functionality.

 

[ahurtt]

Try using the 6.39 nForce drivers instead of the most recent 6.53 ones. My system was working "relatively" ok until I stupidly tried to "upgrade" to 6.53 after which my hard drive corrupted on the first reboot and could not be recovered. Had to reinstall 6.39 along with Windows and everything went back to normal. With 6.39 I believe the NCQ option is still enabled by default. 6.53 hosed my system and I know it hosed other peoples as well.

 

[sxr7171]

NCQ doesn't really have any performance benefits for workstations it actually hurts performance in some parameters. Go to www.storagereview.com and see for yourself.

 

[musgrattios]

How in the world do you turn NCQ on/off, unless you have an older, proprietary mobo that came out before the new gen of chips. Seagate, on their website, says it cannot be turned on/off, it is on by hardware.

Never mind, I read the others, but still, is it a BIOS thing?