No - we would not want to supply individual query hints. I would shy away from second guessing the optimizer with any sort of query hint - Index / join / MAXDOP, you name it. Although God knows I have seen enough instances of each one of those where the optimizer didnt pick the right one.

We ended up setting the server default to a low number so that the optimizer would see that and not use, say a DOP of 8 to resolve a query and go crazy with tempdb. With a lower setting of MAXDOP at the server level, the optimizer is constrained to only spawn so many threads to resolve any query, and from our observations, also uses a proportionally smaller amount of space in tempdb.

Very interesting thread indeed - thanks for that;-). Need to digest all the SQLKiwi says there.