A8N-SLI Deluxe 1003 Final

[bneiderman]

How did you even enable NCQ on your Raptor? There is nothing in BIOS settings about this! The ASUS rep told me it was enabled by default as part of the chipset, but I don't buy it.

 

[sreams]

Originally posted by: bneiderman
How did you even enable NCQ on your Raptor? There is nothing in BIOS settings about this! The ASUS rep told me it was enabled by default as part of the chipset, but I don't buy it.

NCQ is enabled per-drive in Device Manager.

-S

 

[FastEddie]

Originally posted by: bneiderman
How did you even enable NCQ on your Raptor? There is nothing in BIOS settings about this! The ASUS rep told me it was enabled by default as part of the chipset, but I don't buy it.

Should work real well when nvidia releases a unified driver set specifically for NF4. It's got nothing to do with the boards bios, as it's a hardware function of the chipset that nvidia needs to address.

 

[mlc]

is the NCQ issue restricted to the Maxtor drives.. or does it include other models (e.g. Seagate Barracuda )???

 

[FastEddie]

The NCQ issues concerns all sata II drives at the present. It's not any better on any of the other NF4 (Ultra & SLI) boards that are out. It's a hardware function of the chipset that nvidia has to deal with.

 

[bneiderman]

Originally posted by: FastEddie
The NCQ issues concerns all sata II drives at the present. It's not any better on any of the other NF4 (Ultra & SLI) boards that are out. It's a hardware function of the chipset that nvidia has to deal with.

However, a review of NCQ on Tom's Hardware on an Intel rig specifies that the drivers need to be there and AHCI or something needs to be turned on BEFORE OS is installed, otherwise no go later on. Think the same applies here?

 

[mlc]

thanks for the quick reply....

I just built my rig this past weekend.. do haven't had a chance to try enabling the NCQ feature (lucky for me!!!) ... I'll definitiely hold off until I see a fix posted....

 

[mlc]

thanks for the quick reply....

I just built my rig this past weekend.. do haven't had a chance to try enabling the NCQ feature (lucky for me!!!) ... I'll definitiely hold off until I see a fix posted....

 

[ahurtt]

Updates in 1003

1. Re-translation item strings, value and help to French.
2. Fixed asus update 64bit OS fail
3. Fixed AMD Athlon64 CPUs Processor Family will be wrong shown as Opteron
4. Support nVidia DualGPU PCIE VGA card.
5. Change CopyRight year from 2004 to 2005.
6. Support PEG for ATI X850 PCIE card.
7. Modify Cool n Quiet string and default value.
8. Correct Hyper Transport item string for multi-language.

I think the most significant thing here is #4. Does this mean there are single cards which have 2 GPU's on them? Or does it mean they made some kind of fix to SLI support?

 

[FastEddie]

Originally posted by: bneiderman

Originally posted by: FastEddie
The NCQ issues concerns all sata II drives at the present. It's not any better on any of the other NF4 (Ultra & SLI) boards that are out. It's a hardware function of the chipset that nvidia has to deal with.

However, a review of NCQ on Tom's Hardware on an Intel rig specifies that the drivers need to be there and AHCI or something needs to be turned on BEFORE OS is installed, otherwise no go later on. Think the same applies here?

A very good chance the same applies. You won't see any bios setting labled "NCQ Enable" as the board is already passing that info along to the os. It's now nvidia's turn to write the chipset implementation so we can use the feature.

 

[runestone]

Originally posted by: bneiderman
How did you even enable NCQ on your Raptor? There is nothing in BIOS settings about this! The ASUS rep told me it was enabled by default as part of the chipset, but I don't buy it.

It is enabled by default, when I checked my Raptor 74. But, since the Raptor only supports tcq, it doesn't make any difference in the speed tests I tried.

 

[FastEddie]

Originally posted by: runestone

Originally posted by: bneiderman
How did you even enable NCQ on your Raptor? There is nothing in BIOS settings about this! The ASUS rep told me it was enabled by default as part of the chipset, but I don't buy it.

It is enabled by default, when I checked my Raptor 74. But, since the Raptor only supports tcq, it doesn't make any difference in the speed tests I tried.

Maybe the raptors, it's enabled by default. It's not with any other sata II drives. I'm using Seagates sata II drives = have to be enabled in device manager.

 

[ahurtt]

Originally posted by: bneiderman

However, a review of NCQ on Tom's Hardware on an Intel rig specifies that the drivers need to be there and AHCI or something needs to be turned on BEFORE OS is installed, otherwise no go later on. Think the same applies here?

Can you post a link to the article?

 

[davidos]

If it's nVidia's fault that the nForce4 boards don't work with NCQ hard drives then why does the 1002 bios seem to work fine with these drives? It seems like a bios issue to me....

 

[byMaX]

Originally posted by: ahurtt
Updates in 1003

1. Re-translation item strings, value and help to French.
2. Fixed asus update 64bit OS fail
3. Fixed AMD Athlon64 CPUs Processor Family will be wrong shown as Opteron
4. Support nVidia DualGPU PCIE VGA card.
5. Change CopyRight year from 2004 to 2005.
6. Support PEG for ATI X850 PCIE card.
7. Modify Cool n Quiet string and default value.
8. Correct Hyper Transport item string for multi-language.

I think the most significant thing here is #4. Does this mean there are single cards which have 2 GPU's on them? Or does it mean they made some kind of fix to SLI support?

Gigabyte has a card with 2 6600GT GPUs on it - it's called GV-3D1 or 3D10000. It runs on 500 / 560 MHz and it's pretty damn fast (I have reviewed it, and i have some pics of it, tomorrow my review will be up on www.benchmark.co.yu, but you'll only understand graphics with benchmarks, since text is written in Serbian). It's slower than my X850 XT PE, though. And A8N SLI supported X850 even with initial bios 1002! Some other things you copied in your post were fixed prior to final 1003 (in 1003-005,006,007 etc)...

 

[FastEddie]

Originally posted by: davidos
If it's nVidia's fault that the nForce4 boards don't work with NCQ hard drives then why does the 1002 bios seem to work fine with these drives? It seems like a bios issue to me....

The NCQ drives work just fine, as long as NCQ isn't enabled in Device Manager.

 

[JMag]

Originally posted by: FastEddie

Originally posted by: davidos
If it's nVidia's fault that the nForce4 boards don't work with NCQ hard drives then why does the 1002 bios seem to work fine with these drives? It seems like a bios issue to me....

The NCQ drives work just fine, as long as NCQ isn't enabled in Device Manager.

AND you are using 1002

 

[FastEddie]

I'm using 1003. I have two Seagate S-ATA II drives on the nv controllers (raid0). The drives work fine. I don't have NCQ enabled in Device Manager.

 

[ahurtt]

Where do you enable / disable NCQ. I have the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 SATA supposedly w/ NCQ and 16MB cache. I go into Device Manager, expand the Disk Drives, and double click my drive to pop up the properties window. I have a General, Policies, Volumes, Driver, and Details tabs. I don't see anything about NCQ in any of them.

[edit] I am worried because I just got home from work and booted up. It posted but then windows wouldn't load. . .screen went black. I managed to get the display to come back on by unplugging the monitor cable from the video card and plugged it back in and the display said something about a windows System file being corrupt or not found. . . I got it to boot again by a combination of two things. Completely powered down, unplugged PSU. Went into BIOS and enabled SMART. Not sure what made it reboot but it did. Now I want to check for NCQ to make sure it is off because i heard it causes corruption and problems right now. But I can't even find NCQ options.

 

[ahurtt]

nevermind, found it. It is an option under the drive CONTROLLER, not the drive itself. It was disabled already. Now I just have to figure out what happened that my system didn't boot tonight and I got that windows system file error and black screen. I left it running overnight last night and it was still chugging along fine this morning. So I turned it off and went to work. Now I come home, go to boot, and this happens. DAMMIT!

 

[sxr7171]

Originally posted by: ajmiles

Originally posted by: Smoothe
Anyone have a seagate or maxtor harddrive with NCQ enabled and working properly with this bios?

As far as we know they haven't fixed this issue. I have my Western Digital 74GB Raptor working with NCQ, but every BIOS up to the 1003.008 has corrupted stuff within 24 hours or so.

The list they gave out listing the fixes with each BIOS didn't say anything about having fixed this issue as far as I could see, so don't boot your main OS with it enabled.

I didn't think the Raptor supported NCQ, but TCQ instead. Do our SATA controllers support TCQ?

 

[wgoblin]

I have the setup in question... Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250 gb /w 16mb and everything runs just fine....initially i had problems with nforce raid controllers with my 2 maxtor 80 gb (dm9) drives where the second drive was not seen...But at that time i also had a bad memory module in m ycomp and didnt know it...I bought diamondmax10 and installed xp just to find out it gives data corruption when copying bigger files to disk...using ncq just made it worse.

It was memory related...when i changed the bad module everything is fine...

Oh yea ncq is off for now...seems that if i enable it havoc starts...at least it did so with that bad module so i had to reinstall winxp...Dont quite feel safe using it coz i dont have time for another reinstall.

But other than that i never had probs with 1003 bios since the ram was changed, never locked up...never had a bsod after exchanging the ram....
Oh yeah everything is at stock speeds...maybe thats it.

As for raid i dont know if that issue remains in 1003...because i was trying to install raid with 2/dm9's80 gb when i was using 1002 bios. ANd they were exactly the same symptoms as with dissapearing diamond10

So this issue might not be related just to that drive...as for single diamondmax10 combination it never failed to show up on post...
Only error i get is cpu fan failed but that was supposed to be fixed with threshold for fan but i dont see any option like that in bios...When doing cold boot its no wonder fan doesnt start coz temp is low and qfan assumes it doesnt need the fan...atleast thats how i figured it out...and stopped caring for that...:beer:

 

[ahurtt]

Originally posted by: wgoblin
I have the setup in question... Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250 gb /w 16mb and everything runs just fine....

So this issue might not be related just to that drive...as for single diamondmax10 combination it never failed to show up on post...

Did you have the drive connected to the nVidia SATA controller or the Silicon controller? The Silicon is the red plugs and the nVidia ones are the black ones. And which port did you have it in 1,2,3,4?

 

[wgoblin]

Its in nvidia sata port 1.

THose two maxtors i was speaking about were tried in ports 1 and 2 then in 3 and 4 then in 1 and 3 it was always the same...eventually i moved it to silicon image controller where all was fine(except at the time it wasnt coz i had a bad memory module).

Then i bought maxtor diamondmax 10 and moved the two maxtors in my other rig (a7n8x).

Like i said since the first second i installed it i havent had any recognition problems...It might be worth mentioning i had bios 1003-8 installed at that time...

With my mdm10 drive i use dvd-rw on primary ide as master (40 pin cable) and dvd rom on secondary ide as master (80pin cable)....I dont know why im mentioning this, but it might come in useful.

I dont have any other hdds in system..Also silicon image bios is disabled in bios. So is nv raid and obviously raid on any of the sata ports then.

Posts great..always...(knock on wood)

 

[imported_2x]

Installed the 1003 bios and the only issue is that when I try to change the new DDR settings that were added to the original setup the bios screen freezes requiring a reset. They are all set for auto and I guess I'll learn to like it