Fastest AGP Card for an AMD Chipset??

[i440bx]

Hi guys,

a friend of mine has an old Gigabyte GA-7IXE4. It supports only AGP 1.0 (2x)... So what a Graphics Card can i sell him??

My Girlfriend has a MB with the i440BX Chipset and a 800MHZ P3, and i put a Geforce 4TI-4600 on it what works fine!

My first thought was a Geforce 2 GTS... But can i sell him a Geforce 3 or 4? I doesn't know the AMD Irongate Chipset, because i only work with Intel Chipsets (love to the i440BX ) & CPUs.

Greetings, Robert

[samnmax]

In theory any AGP 2x card (or 4x/2x, with 2 notches on the connector) would work, so any card that works in the BX chipset should work with the AMD 750.

I have the same motherboard with a Voodoo5 5500 (dual GPU - but not good for anything serious) and if I remember correctly I once used a Nvidia Riva TNT2 M64 AGP 4x/2x and it worked fine.

BTW, I built that system thinking that I would be able to play Enemy Territory, but frame rate is awful... what is to blame: the Voodoo or the Processor/memory (900 MHz Athlon + 384MB PC100)

[Alcochaser]

This can be problematic, part of the AGP spec was the amount of current a card could draw from the slot. AGP2 doubled the amount of current. So the new card could draw too much current for the motherboard. There are also voltage issues, but thankfully the AGP key keeps you from inserting the wrong card. Cards with 32MB of ram and above are particularly problematic on a Slot A

Now... if you can perhaps find a high end AGP card with a drive power connector. These cards draw a TON of power, so they decided to add a power connector to draw direct from the power supply. Of course, these cards on AGP were rare, and usually high end and expensive.

The AMD750 AGP implementation left a lot to be desired. Often times with a more modern card you have to use the BIOS to lock the card to use AGP 1.0

Of course, you could buy a PCI card and just deal with the bandwidth bottleneck to save installation hassles.

Watch your power supply. Adding a newer card will increase your power draw, which could cause the problems with the often thristy Slot A cpus.