ASUS – New ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe BIOS Files – TCQ Issue Fix?

The Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe which in the post below appears to maybe have TCQ issues, has two new bios files posted up on the German FTP. Both are dated 1/25 and they are versions 1003sd and 1004sd01. Perhaps a TCQ fix could be in these?

New Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe Bios Files Dated 1/25
AMDZone

It appears there might be a data corruption problem when enabling TCQ on the nForce 4 chipset at least with the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe. Check out this forum post for more details. I’ve yet to try TCQ as all of our Western Digital Raptors are in a server. You can learn about TCQ in this pdf from Western Digital. Anyway you may want to take some caution when enabling TCQ and make sure you do have a backup. Here is a post from sadtherobot on the alledged issue.

No, I have not been able to get TCQ working reliably with the current nForce4 drivers, they are the worst nvidia drivers I’ve seen in a long time. Every time I’ve enabled TCQ in either the 32-bit or 64-bit versions of windows, I get massive corruption of files. As for TCQ on the nForce3 chipset, it does not seem to work correctly either, I’ve tested it on a few computers using different drives, my main test was using 1 of my computers which is a SN95G5 with a 74GB raptor. Data corruption does not occur on the nForce3 boards, instead it drops transfer rates to much lower than they should be. For instance, using the 32-bit version of windows and the nForce 5.10 drivers, with TCQ enabled, the computer takes at least 3 times longer to start up and nvidia’s speed test shows the sustained transfer rate at about 5MB/s (down from 70). Using the 64-bit version of windows and the 6.25 drivers, there is a speed decrease, but it is not nearly as bad as the 32-bit loss of speed, the nvidia speed test shows about 9MB/s (instead of 71). Whether these transfer rates are correct or not isnt really the issue (i highly doubt it’s going at 5-9MB/s), the problem is that there is a noticable decrease in speed and their own synthetic tests shows very poor results, which means that something is indeed wrong with the TCQ support. I think the only reason the 64-bit loss wasnt as bad is because the drivers actually support read caching, unlike the massively out-dated 32-bit drivers.

nForce 4 TCQ Data Corruption Issue?
AMDZone