AGP4X Motherboard with an AGP8X Graphic Card?

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Orhan

Hi,

I have an old system running 98SE with PIII (800 MHz) motherboard
(AOpen MX34,AGP4X) and GeForce2 MX400 graphic card. Can I use an AGP8X
graphic card like GF FX5200 in this system without any problem?

The AGP8X cards support AGP2X/4X/8X as far as I know. Am I wrong?

Any comments and helps, please?

Orhan
 
Orhan said:
Hi,

I have an old system running 98SE with PIII (800 MHz) motherboard
(AOpen MX34,AGP4X) and GeForce2 MX400 graphic card. Can I use an AGP8X
graphic card like GF FX5200 in this system without any problem?

The AGP8X cards support AGP2X/4X/8X as far as I know. Am I wrong?

Any comments and helps, please?

Orhan
Click to expand...

The cards are backwards compatible. The question is will your board support
the card?

FRH
 
Orhan said:
Hi,

I have an old system running 98SE with PIII (800 MHz) motherboard
(AOpen MX34,AGP4X) and GeForce2 MX400 graphic card. Can I use an AGP8X
graphic card like GF FX5200 in this system without any problem?

The AGP8X cards support AGP2X/4X/8X as far as I know. Am I wrong?

Any comments and helps, please?

Orhan
Click to expand...

My question is - is it worth buying the AGP8x card or should we spend the
money getting a 4x card with more memory?

Martin
 
Martin said:
My question is - is it worth buying the AGP8x card or should we spend the
money getting a 4x card with more memory?

Martin
Click to expand...

More memory? Most 8x cards come with 128mb. You don;t need more than
that. Another factor to consider to consider is if the OP needs DX9
compatibility, or if DX8 is good enough.
 
sooky grumper said:
More memory? Most 8x cards come with 128mb. You don;t need more than
that. Another factor to consider to consider is if the OP needs DX9
compatibility, or if DX8 is good enough.
Click to expand...

your right about that, i guess i wouldnt need more than 128 but then a 4x
card with 128 costs less than an 8x card with 128... will the more expensive
card show any real advantage?
 
Martin said:
your right about that, i guess i wouldnt need more than 128 but then a 4x
card with 128 costs less than an 8x card with 128... will the more expensive
card show any real advantage?
Click to expand...

That all depends on what you're planning to do with it, doesn't it? If
you want to make use of DirectX 9 features for games, then you'd
probably be looking at getting an 8x card (though some 4x cards may
support DX 9, I don't know).
 
Martin Stennett said:
My question is - is it worth buying the AGP8x card or should we spend the
money getting a 4x card with more memory?
Click to expand...

You might check whether the 8x board will even function at 8x. I believe
the 8x spec calls for 1.5 volts inside where as 4x is 3 volts (and 2x is 5
volts?). The socket is coded to tell the machine which flavor board you
have plugged in, but if the MB is not designed to accept the 8x board, it
won't buy you anything.

Maybe someone else knows more about this area than I do.
 
Martin Stennett said:
My question is - is it worth buying the AGP8x card or should we spend the
money getting a 4x card with more memory?

Martin
Click to expand...

Maybe you are right Martin. I know that a FX5200 won't be profitable
on this system running 98SE. But it's my son who uses this pc and he
want to have DX9 support, for future purposes also. The old card has
a 64MB graphic memory. This time I intend to buy a card with 128MB.
System memory is 256MB.

My question is more hardware related.

Orhan
 
I have 2 Nvidia Ti4200 cards and they are each in a pair of NF7s v 2.0
mainboards running a gb of ram and a Barton 2500xp at 3200 speed(11x200
fsb). One of them is 4x and the other is 8x. Both run XP and DX9B. The 4x
card has 64mb and the 8x has 128mb. In a 3d mark test the results are
actually close enough to not write home to momma about. Both machines play
Dungeon Siege LOA just fine. In the real world my eye can see no difference
between them but the 8x cost me more....

IMO the FX5200 in the system you describe would be a large outlay of cash
for very little, if any gain. Now if you had some serious processing power
that would very likely be a whole different story. In other words, your 800
P3 may not have the power to scale that card to make any difference over
what you have now. (Bang for the buck).

I think the GeForce2 MX400 card you have now is a pretty good match for what
you have under the hood.

I recently retired a ABIT BE6-II with a P3-850 that I ran a Geforce2 GTS-V
32mb card in and I was pretty well satisfied. That card and your current
card are fairly similar to each other and the MX400 may even be a little
better.

Win98SE runs DX9B not A just fine in any case.

If it were me, I'd buy another stick of ram for the mainboard to bring it up
to 512 and leave the video card alone. You would notice more of an
improvement with the ram than the video card in your system, but that is
just my opinion.

Just some thoughts for you to ponder from one who has been there..........

Bob "hopelessly insane machine warrior" Troll
 
What about game performance with higher resolutions? I guess the
graphic memory does affect it more than the system memory do it.
Doesn't it?

Well. It's clear enough now that it wouldn't be worse than expected
with a new card. And the lowest graphic card with DX9 support is a
FX5200 with 128MB when I could get it to work with my son's 4X
motherboard.

Thanks for all comments.

Orhan
 
I just wanted to tell what I did:

I tried a Winfast 340TD (FX5200,128MB) on my motherboard AOpen MX34
(VIA Apollo Pro 133A). Unfortunately it was impossible for me to run
this graphic card with AGP4X.

After enabling AGP4X in registry I tried a lot of values for Hi and
Low Bit by changing the AGP driving value to manual in BIOS. The card
runs only with AGP2X on this board. Therefore the performance gain was
minimal in comparison with GF2MX SH Pro that is already running with
AGP4X. So I removed the card.

Perhaps the board needs a BIOS update.

I won't change my graphic card. Thanks again.

Orhan
 
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