Test System System

Processor(s): Intel Pentium 4 3.46GHz EE (1066 FSB) (Supplied by Intel)

Motherboard(s): ASUS P5AD2-E 925XE / ICH6R (Supplied by ASUS)

Memory(s): OCZ 2x 512MB PC-5400 (Supplied by OCZ)

Video Card(s): ATI Radeon X600 128MB

Operating System Used: Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP1

Drivers Used: Intel INF 6.3.0.1008, DX9c and ATI Catalyst 5.2

We choose to use the ASUS P5AD2-E motherboard based on the Intel 925XE chipset with ICH6R south bridge since it is one of the few chipsets which support NCQ. Brand new chipsets from nVidia and VIA support NCQ but the ASUS board was readily available to us hence the reason it was used. The Intel ICH6R provides the connection to the system for the SATA hard drives in our benchmarks.

We've compared the new Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 against itself with NCQ enabled and disabled (disabled NCQ by changing the IDE configuration in the BIOS from AHCI to Standard IDE) as well as against the mighty Western Digital Raptor 74GB and an older Barracuda version, 7200.7 without NCQ support. WD's Raptor supports TCQ (Tagged Command Queuing - similar to NCQ) but not many chipsets support TCQ at this stage. During our testing the Raptor was without any form of command queuing.

Unfortunately Seagate only sent us a single 400GB drive so we were unable to perform any RAID 0 testing but this is something we would like to look at in the future, hopefully with the 16MB cache versions.

It's the new and old generation 7200 rpm Seagate Barracuda drives up against the consumer level 10,000 rpm Raptor from Western Digital. Let's see if the new Seagate drive can keep pace with the faster spindle spinning Raptor.

HD Tach

Version and / or Patch Used: 2.70

Developer Homepage: http://www.simplisoftware.com

Product Homepage: http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach