Maximum PC

Hey guys,

I just got an MSI 9800 Pro and realized that my motherboard only supports up to 4X AGP. What kind of a performance hit am I suffering, if any?

I upgraded from a Ti4200, so I am damn happy anyway. The card rocks

Probably not anything noticable.

I'm also running an 8x card in a 4x slot. However, we'd need someone with an 8x card/slot that can drop it down to 4x mode to tell us if there's a noticable difference.

i dont think it matters

games dont saturate it enough to make the 8x that much better

I don't play any of the games that really push a video card, but I've had my Radeon 9200 running at 4x and at 8x and I don't notice any difference.

Cool, that's good to know. I just hate bottlenecks, but I guess this is not one of them.

I kinda sux how they are trying to phase out AGP when it still has alot of headroom.

they're not trying to phase it out. introducing a newer formfactor doesn't mean trying to phase out the old one.

None of the new Intel chipsets support AGP and when the next-gen AMD boards come out, I dont think they will have AGP slots either.

Yeah, they might still manufacture AGP boards, but all the money and work will go towards improving the newer technology.

At least that's what it looks like to me.

that may be true, but its not that agp is bad, the biggest reason is that pcie gives the card more power so it can run better. you will see very little if any difference between agp 4x and 8x, its alsop the same way between agp 8x and pcie.

PCIE has so much more to offer than power (power's offered to video cards by a 6-pin connector right off the PS). The key benefit it's bringing is four-way traffic lanes. We say that x8 AGP isn't used because they can't code many games to use all that bandwidth as it generally clogs up around x4 anyway. With PCIE, they can code much cleaner and use all the lanes and actually get x8-x12 (maybe all the x16 speed at some time) bandwidth put into actual use with no traffic jams.

We will need this tech soon, as it's going to get more complicated to not choke up the AGP lanes we're running on now and still move forward with better graphics.