Nice tip to shave a couple seconds off your Verfying/Load time

[Bungalow_Bill]

This tip is for the people who have newer SATA hard drives, all you need to do is disable NCQ (Native Command Queuing). Not only can it create problems with the NF4 chipset on some boards (as it has done with me), but it slows your drive down in certain circumstances. In single-threaded requests NCQ adds overhead and slows the drive down (in other words, great for servers, bad for gamers). Since NCQ deals with seeking on the drive you'll also want to make sure you're perfectly defragmented to get the most out of disabling it.

I stumbled across this boost when I had disabled NCQ a couple months back for troubleshooting, at the time I was almost the first or second loader. Then I took an extended break from BF2 for a couple months, formated (thus losing this NCQ setting) and noticing I was being outloaded by a lot more people than I used to be. I initially credited my being beat on load to more people having faster computers, but then I remembered I was missing this setting. Disabling NCQ decreased my Verfying Data and overall intial load time a noticable amount. Normally I'd be in the top 3-5 loaders on my team, now I seem to almost always be in the top 2, and I can physically notice the decreased times (but it is slight). But as many fast loaders know the a second off your load time can mean the difference between getting that tank/plane or not.

Enjoy this tip, here's a screenshot detailing the exact location of the NCQ setting on my system (will vary on different computers).

http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/58/ncq6vw.jpg

[imported_yehaaa7]

i have to confest that i didnt understand anything...

[DOGGiE52]

Good find there. These VCD fixes should be put together into a sticky/guide, really!

[davelisowski]

Hmm. I wonder if my drive has that on or not. I'm not at home so I can't check until later.

A quick Google search brought plenty of info that supports what you said. Disabling NCQ seems to improve performance. Basically NCQ makes the computer process tasks in the "best" way, and non-NCQ has the computer process the tasks in the order it receives them. That's my understanding anyway. Correct any mistakes.

[Jhill27]

nice find :)

[N2K]

Mine wasn't enabled

[zipp0r]

hmm, im always first in anyway :p

thing is although ncq disabled should be faster, what other requests is the drive getting at the same time your loading bf2 ? if its not getting any other requests it will be going as fast as it can already.

ncq is likely to be helpful when in windows and doing lots of stuff at the same time.

p.s planewhore u have a seagate sata1 drive, try a hitatchi or raptor sata 2, they are way faster.

[Heavy552 AWG]

Nice tip. I still say fast SATA 3.0's in RAID 3 or 4 will probably have a significant load advantage over a single drive. Hardware wars is a fact of life here, go fast and be first in or go home LOL.

[davelisowski]

what other requests is the drive getting at the same time your loading bf2 ? if its not getting any other requests it will be going as fast as it can already.

True, but there are a lot of things that run in the background. Firewall, scvhost, etc. There are ways to minimize the background apps, but there are some that you should not stop. Then again, most people don't/haven't done this anyways.

But, yeah, I agree that NCQ is helpful when you are multi-tasking. i.e. music, web browsing, writing a paper, etc.

[zipp0r]

True, but there are a lot of things that run in the background. Firewall, scvhost, etc. There are ways to minimize the background apps, but there are some that you should not stop. Then again, most people don't/haven't done this anyways.

But, yeah, I agree that NCQ is helpful when you are multi-tasking. i.e. music, web browsing, writing a paper, etc.

but they are not constantly making requests to access the harddrive, in fact they may not make any at all. about the only thing i can think of is a virus scanner, but you should be disabling that before you play anyway.

[Heavy552 AWG]

I had 4 seperate virus scanners, 3 different kinds of firewalls and all kinds of crap hanging onto my system and still first in to load on some servers. All of that software was trashed and just have a "Good" router and one security program. That's it.

I dont think it's the data load on the hard drive, it's the game itself that is the problem here with such draconian verifying load times. I think finding servers that support your ability to load first every time or nearly so is the key. Linux based servers are the first choice followed by pure servers.

[Bungalow_Bill]

p.s planewhore u have a seagate sata1 drive, try a hitatchi or raptor sata 2, they are way faster.
That drive is old as dirt for sure but as odd as it may sound I'm pretty much a top 3 loader every single time on a 64 player server using that exact drive. However I'm now packing more power with about 200mb/s read time thanks to Raid and some amazingly cheap SATA II drives.