MOBO's with more than one AGP slot?

[iconhead]

Does it exist? Or perhaps is that something we'll se in the near future? I'd like to have three monitors without compromising performance (Parhelia)so let's say two Radeon 9700 PRO would do the trick...?

 

[TechnoHillbilly]

I haven't run across one.

<b><font color=blue>Listening to nature is the music of the Soul</font color=blue></b>

 

[LumberJack]

IC.. the answer as far as I know is no... sorry... a pci card say 7500 is perfectly fine though if you just want 2d on the other monitor.. that's what i do...



To err is human... to really screw things up you need a computer!

 

[Crashman]

AGP is a Port, not a Bus. You can't add another port without changing chipset as far as I know.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>

 

[iconhead]

But do you know the reason for the unavailability? I mean is it a technical reason for it, or is it just too far off? ;-) Yes, I also use a second PCI card to get the third screen output, but I'm a musician and use the computer as a DAW, and DAW's are extremely sensible to PCI bus overflow. I get it alot if there's lots of thing happening on the PCI screen. For me it would have been alot better if it was more than one slot for the AGP bus. And today we have 8x AGP so speed shouldn't be a problem... Or?

 

[fiask0]

Have you tried the matrox one? Are you sure you'd take that much performance hit using it? Are you doing things that are graphic intensive that require a 9700 pro?

 

[4Ryan6]

Have you considered the Dual CPU M/Bs with the 3 high speed PCI slots/ and 3 regular PCI slots, they probably would do everything you need with PCI graphics cards?

<b><font color=purple>Details, Details, Its all in the Details, If you need help, Don't leave out the Details.</font color=purple></b>

 

[NEUTRALITY]

While we're on the topic, can mobo's with integrated graphics AND an agp port support both an integrated and an add-in card? Or does the onboard have to be disabled?

_________
<font color=blue><i>WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO..........sex.</i></font color=blue>

 

[Pako]

There is only ONE link for an AGP slot to the North Bridge
so there can be only one AGP slot.

 

[srg]

Actually, the AGP Bus is a seperate BUS and is in essance a modified PCI bus. The x1 AGP is simply a single node PCI bus with different wiring, 66MHz frequencey (like 64-bit PCI) and slot design, then in x2, x4, x8 they modified it even more for better performance.

The whole original point of AGP was to put the Graphics card on its own seperate bus so it wouldn't be held up other devices like PCI graphics cards are.

In fact, on a machine with no AGP, if you run a program that detects the number of PCI busses on a system, it will say that there is 1 PCI bus, on even a modern x8 AGP system, that same program will state that there are two PCI busses!!

srg

Windows XP Works on a K5 PR133 (100MHz) with 80MB RAM!!!!!!<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by srg on 04/28/03 06:53 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[soulprovider]

First off, it's very unlikely that chipset designers would incorporate that feature into a northbridge IC due to the high cost of R&D which would far outweigh the demand. Also as the full bandwidth to the AGP slot is hardly every utilised, a VGA card built for multiple performance outputs is the most logical choice.

Regarding the bandwidth limitation of your PCI bus, older boards use this bus as the link between North and Southbridges. Therefore every peripheral in your system is using this channel to talk to the memory and CPU.

On newer boards the PCI bus is fed off the southbridge and a larger channel connects the North/Southbridge.
What this means is that your drives,USB,keyboard etc will not affect your PCI bandwidth. Running several PCI VGA cards should therefore not affect your other equipment.

<b>Vorsprung durch Dontwerk</b>.....<i>as they say at VIA</i>

 

[Crashman]

Problem is, there are no AGP1x boards. And when you see AGP x1, they are refering to the number of slots, not the data rate. The original AGP chipsets were 2x compatable.

But AGP is ported directly to RAM and to the CPU through the northbridge, if I recall correctly. So it's unique and designed for one card.

Also, Windows XP might run on a K5 PR133 with 80MB RAM, but not well. In fact, Windows 95 would be around 300% faster (or more) on such a machine.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>

 

[Twitch]

While we're on the topic, can mobo's with integrated graphics AND an agp port support both an integrated and an add-in card? Or does the onboard have to be disabled?

I'm curious if anyone knows the answer to this question...




<font color=green>The Netherlands is where you go when you're too good for heaven.</font color=green> :tongue:

 

[srg]

AGP 2x uses both rising and faling edges of the clock, AGP 1x uses just one edge (probably the rising edge).The original AGP 1.0 spec supported both 1x and 2x. Appologies, in my last post I meant to say AGP 1.0, 2.0 etc.

I agree that the AGP is a single slot design, In an AGP system, it is connected to the CPU and RAM vire a CPU -> AGP bridge, then there is a AGP -> PCI bridge and finally a PCI -> ISA bridge (Yep, your floppy is still basically ISA). The AGP Card uses (if supported) Bus Mastering to move data to and from main memory.

The beauty of AGP though is that unlike PCI, there aren't any other things (like other PCI and even 8-bit ISA cards) to hold it up.

BTW I have tried WinXP on my K5 133 with 80MB RAM and Although Win95 was faster, I'd only say about 50% at best (it was a long time ago that I did this). Believe it or not, I was surprised myself, although I wouldn't use it as my normal setup.

Windows XP Works on a K5 PR133 (100MHz) with 80MB RAM!!!!!!