Hello all,
I’m going to be buying a new graphics card soon, and I want to buy the most cost effective one. My question is, how can you identify which speed your agp port is?
Thanks
Here’s an article on Wikipedia that should be helpful.
Check the section on Versions of AGP, as well as this picture.
Hope that helps.
Check your motherboard manual. If for whatever reason you don’t have one, look on your mobo to see if it has the brand and model on it. Then google the model #.
most computers don’t have AGP ports any more, they use PCI Express. You would be hard pressed to find any modern board that did support AGP to support anything lower than 4x.
As for functionality, AGP 8x is fast enough for most graphics needs. PCI Express 16x is top of the line and can out perform AGP - but I don’t think we ever did max out AGP 8x unless you used your systems ram for texture memory.
They don’t make 1X,2X or 4X anymore. That’s so 2003.
About the PCIx is faster than AGP is true only if the graphic chip is faster. Like the gf8800.
Any other low end card is equally fast.
Thanks everybody, I found an online manual and the motherboard is agp 4x
It won’t be easy or cheap to find a modern video card that supports AGP.
Jazz, you can probably go up to GF4-6600 as the fastest usefull chip you could get on an AGP port.
Alltaken
I found an agp geforce 6600 with 256MB for $50, does 128mb ram make that much of a difference on performance, or should I go lower?
There exists no “GF4-6600”…
The more powerfull nVidia cards for AGP are quite overpriced IMHO, depending on your CPU a 6600 or 7600GS/GT could make sense, but i was disappointed by the increase from a GeFroce2 GTS to a GeForce 6600 on my dual Athlon XP1800+ system, most games were still CPU limited as soon as you enabled extra details etc, you could only crank up resolution and have some pixel shader effects, but still no great frame rates.
For blender, it doesn’t give anything anyway, high polycounts are waaaay CPU limited…maybe when blender’s OpenGL gets optimized a bit more agressively, but not currently.
eh… any AGP video card can be used in any AGP motherboard. You’ll just be limited. If the card only supports 2x AGP but your Mobo is 4x then the board will run it at 2x. If you bought a 8x card, it will still work, just at the 4x max of your board. That card sounds pretty good. The 128 mb of ram… well… it depends. That board, at 4X AGP… will most likely not be an amazingly huge upgrade, depending of course on whatever card you have now. If you have a GeForce2MX you’ll probably see an improvement. If you have a GeForce4 or better already, you probably won’t see much of a difference so far as FPS etc are concerned. You would probably be able to use some of the newer features (pixel shaders, basically) without a loss in performance, but don’t expect to be running Oblivion or HL2 with all the settings up or anything.
I would suggest saving for a longer period of time and getting a new motherboard that has a PCI-e slot, but if your current board uses 4x agp, the likeliness that you will also have to buy a new CPU and RAM along with your new Mobo and graphics card is pretty high. If it were me i’d start saving… but that’s just me…
I’ll have to find the link, but my card is a GeForce 7300 GT AGP 8x 256 MB.
[Edit] You can get a 7950 GT AGP 8X and other GeForce 7 series cards here.
[Edit 2] Here is the GeForce 6 series in AGP if you need something cheaper. link
Squiggly_P
actually you cannot use 4x or 8x Cards in a 2x board, since it is running a different voltage.
4x and 8x are compatible though
Oh good thanks Alltaken, I bought the card and it’s 8X and I was wondering if it would work with my 4X slot.