AGP and PCI

Discussion in 'The Living Room' started by esaul17, Aug 11, 2006.

  1. #1
    esaul17

    esaul17 antichrist

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    I have two questions. First, if a motherboard only supports PCI, is there any way to get an AGP card to work with it? I doubt it, but just incase.

    Second, how much better are AGP cards than PCI? Is the difference humongous?
     
  2. #2
    Feenix

    Feenix Well I Do

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    In answer to your first question. No. No no no.

    Second, AGP cards are much, much better than PCI mainly cause it gives you a dedicated path between the slot and your CPU. It's also a lot faster because of the way AGP handles things. Textures, for example. A PCI card would have to copy a texture from RAM into your card's buffer, whereas AGP cards can read textures directly from RAM. It's just generally a hell of a lot faster. There isn't a single serious gaming card isn't either AGP or PCI-Express.

    Talking of PCI-Express, that's even better than AGP. Confusing you now? Good. PCI-Express is a big advancement upon PCI, it's not very widespread at the moment though. See AGP 8x is capable of a maximum theoretical data rate of around 2GB/s. PCI-Express however is theoretially capable of around twice that.

    So to sum it up in a sentance. AGP is better than PCI, but not as good as PCI-Express (in theory).
     
  3. #3
    Neil

    Neil Super Duper Member LPA Super Member

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    If you have an AGP card and are looking to upgrade in th future, you should look into the motherboard I have, the ASROCK Dual Socket 939 (Assuming you have a socket 939 AMD processor, which isnt much of a problem due to the recent massive AMD price drops)

    It has AGP and PCI-E slots. Quite useful.
     

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