Our testing methods
To test the benefits of Native Command Queuing, we ran through our test suite with a couple of NCQ-capable hard drives running with command queuing enabled and disabled.
All tests were run at least twice, and their results were averaged, using the following test system.
| Processor | Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz |
| Front-side bus | 800MHz |
| Motherboard | Asus P5WD2 Premium WiFiTV Edition |
| BIOS revision | 0422 |
| North bridge | Intel 955X |
| South bridge | Intel ICH7R |
| Chipset drivers | Intel 7.2.1.1003 |
| Memory size | 1GB (2 DIMMs) |
| Memory type | Micron DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz |
| CAS latency (CL) | 3 |
| RAS to CAS delay (tRCD) | 3 |
| RAS precharge (tRP) | 3 |
| Cycle time (tRAS) | 8 |
| Hard drives | Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 160GB PATA Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB SATA Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GB SATA |
| Storage drivers | Intel RAID/AHCI 5.1.0.1022 |
| Audio | ICH7R/ALC882D |
| Audio driver | Realtek HD 1.22 |
| Graphics | ATI Radeon X700 Pro 256MB with CATALYST 5.4 drivers |
| OS | Microsoft Windows XP Professional |
| OS updates | Service Pack 2, DirectX 9.0c |
iPEAK trace playback requires an empty disk, so our system's OS and applications are running off a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 ATA/133 hard drive.
Our test systems were powered by OCZ PowerStream power supply units. The PowerStream was one of our Editor's Choice winners in our latest PSU round-up.
We used the following versions of our test applications:
- Intel iPEAK Storage Performance Toolkit 3.0
The test systems' Windows desktop was set at 1280x1024 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.
All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.
