What's AGP Pro?

excitron

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I'm considering getting a Gigabyte GA-7NNXP, and I noticed it comes with an AGP Pro slot. Is this slot backwards-compatible with standard AGP? I just bought an XFX FX 5200 card and I want to make shure it will fit.

What advantage does AGP Pro offer? Thanks for any info.
 

dunno

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AGP Pro simply supports higher voltages in order to support some higher-end professional video card power requirements. But it should be backward compatible with normal AGP. So for most, AGP pro offers no advantage.
 

cdpage

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Oh would that be for a card like mine?

I have a 9500pro and have power running to it... is the AGP pro slot supposed to get rid of that? so i don't have to do that anymore?


ASUS P4S8X - P4 2.4B - 2 x 512M DDR333 - ATI 9500 Pro(Sapphire) - WD 80G HD (8M Buffer) - SAMSUNG SV0844D 8G HD - LG 16X DVD - Yamaha F1 CDRW - Iomega Zip 250 int.
 

dunno

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Nope, the card has to be specifically AGP Pro. AGP Pro has a slightly different slot. Although a regular AGP card will fit in AGP Pro slot, an AGP Pro card wouldn't fit in regular AGP slot.

Newer AGP cards having power connectors is just the way it is. Maybe when PCI Express arrives, new video cards might not need power connectors anymore.
 

cdpage

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i hope so... i hate all the freeking wireing going on in there and when i found out i had to use a power connect for my vid card... oh man, pissed me off.

that and i think my fans run permanently higher now too.

i wonder what would happen if i just didn;t plug it in :p

BTW what is the differance between PCI-X and EXPRESS?



ASUS P4S8X - P4 2.4B - 2 x 512M DDR333 - ATI 9500 Pro(Sapphire) - WD 80G HD (8M Buffer) - SAMSUNG SV0844D 8G HD - LG 16X DVD - Yamaha F1 CDRW - Iomega Zip 250 int.
 

Crashman

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Yep. AGP Pro is an extended slot, the extension is for supplying extra power to special cards, and is simply unused with PC cards. The rest of the slot is standard and will work with your card.

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Crashman

Polypheme
Former Staff
No company had the tenacity to use an AGP Pro format for a gaming card, instead relying on power cables.

PCI-X is an enhanced version of standard PCI, PCI-Express is a new serial connection.

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cdpage

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man thats just stupid... i hate when 2 seperat standerds come out at the same time.

ok so now that Mac has jumped on the PCI-X i take it that PC makers will just go with the PCI-Express.

does this enhanced version work with normaly PCI cards or do you need a PCI-X card?
if it is backwords compatible, does the enhancement improve a regular PCI card...meaning do developers need to make PCI-X cards or is the normal PCI card enough to recieve these benifits.



ASUS P4S8X - P4 2.4B - 2 x 512M DDR333 - ATI 9500 Pro(Sapphire) - WD 80G HD (8M Buffer) - SAMSUNG SV0844D 8G HD - LG 16X DVD - Yamaha F1 CDRW - Iomega Zip 250 int.
 
PCI-X is also older (older than MAC's inclusion), and slower. I have PCI-X on my ASUS A7M266D mobo. I THOUGHT it was the wave of the future but it's mainly used for large RAIDed HDs and Gigabit ethernet right now.

PCI-EX is a different and there are even different flavours of it. The future PXI-EX connectors will be smaller, but for a while they will include both PCI and PCI-EX on the same slot for easy backwards compatibility. Some computers will ship with all 3. Some mobos were previewed with 15 PCI-EX connectors on one mobo.

The main difference is that PCI-X was used in conjunctions with all the other connectors (my mobo has 2 different PCI-X slots and 3 PCI slots, and 1 AGPpro slot, PCI-EX should REPLACE all the other connectors.

Apple's adoption of PCI-X seems VERY shortsighted IMO. However PCI-EX is kinda more an Intel thing so I giess they didn't want to support the 'enemy', even though that's harder to decide who's who with IBM and MS so integral to APPLE's strategies.


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Crashman

Polypheme
Former Staff
PCI-X has been used for years for improving transfer rates on high demand PCI cards such a SCSI controllers.

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