Will all AGP 8x cards downgrade to 4x?

MarkTAWMarkTAW Brooklyn, NY
edited September 2005 in Hardware
I have an old AGP 4x mobo and I want to upgrade my graphics card. One place is telling me all 8x cards are backwards compatible, but another is telling me I have to look specifically for the cards that say "8x/4x" on the box.

So what should I get, a decent 8x card, or the best 8x/4x card I can find?

Comments

  • MAGICMAGIC Doot Doot Furniture City, Michigan Icrontian
    edited September 2005
    Yes 8x is backwards compatible to 4, however ive seen some cases where the board doesnt recognize the card. your going to take a performance hit though. best bet imo would be to upgrade your mobo to an 4x/8x and get the card a bit later. either or good luck with it
  • CammanCamman NEW! England Icrontian
    edited September 2005
    the available bandwidth on an 8x AGP pipe really is overkill, you're not going to notice a huge performance difference between 4x and 8x, especially if its an older video card, should be backwards compatible and work just fine
  • MarkTAWMarkTAW Brooklyn, NY
    edited September 2005
    Yeah. My primary concern isn't killer graphics - I mostly play console games, but my girlfriend is obsessed with The Sims, and Nightlife won't work with my graphics card (Radeon 7500). It keeps freezing.

    So our two options were GeForce 6600 for $150 (8x), and a GeForce (FX, I think) 5500 (8x/4x) for $70. (We're not going to spend $300 on a graphics card...)

    Before we decided to get either one, I wanted to know whether or not the 6600 would work. I just want the game to work, but, you know, being able to turn on smoothing & stuff would be nice too.

    So what I'm hearing is that in theory, it should be backwards compatible, but my mobo may not recognize it, and the 6600 therefore is a risk.
  • CammanCamman NEW! England Icrontian
    edited September 2005
    most of the AGP cards will say they can run at 4x/8x on the box. I don't know about the specifics of the 6600, but, my 9700 Pro was an "8x card" but I had to run it at 4x because of a problem with my motherboard. If you have a 4x AGP motherboard, and the card is 8x, I would almost guarantee it will run at 4x, but just check the specs before you buy the card.
  • EnverexEnverex Worcester, UK Icrontian
    edited September 2005
    You're not going to notice ANY performance difference between 4x and 8x, it's just unneeded.
  • MAGICMAGIC Doot Doot Furniture City, Michigan Icrontian
    edited September 2005
    what board and cpu?
  • MarkTAWMarkTAW Brooklyn, NY
    edited September 2005
    Soyo Dragon KT333. And some sort of AMD. Used to be an Athalon, but I replaced it because I thought it was bad (turns out it was OK) with whatever they had in the local computer store.
  • MarkTAWMarkTAW Brooklyn, NY
    edited September 2005
    Camman wrote:
    most of the AGP cards will say they can run at 4x/8x on the box.

    Yeah, I asked the sales guy to see the box so I could check the specs, and one guy said "Yeah, it'll work" and another guy said "No, it won't work unless it says 8x/4x on the box." Since the store was closing, I was never able to see the box.

    Maybe NVIDIA's site has something about this.
  • MarkTAWMarkTAW Brooklyn, NY
    edited September 2005
    Hmm found some links.

    AGP Compatability

    Will my AGP 8x card work in my 4x slot <--Google Cache version

    Will an 8x AGP video card work in a 4x slot?

    > Answer
    >
    > No, not unless it specifically says that it has 4X compatability. 4X runs at
    > 1.07-Gbps and 8X runs at 2.1-GBps so your motherboard will not
    > recognize your Graphics card.

    (There's a lot more discussion on that last link than that simplistic answer)
  • MarkTAWMarkTAW Brooklyn, NY
    edited September 2005
    Ah, this page has a lot of good info.

    http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.html

    "Every single video card I could find which claimed to be an AGP 3.0 card was actually a universal 1.5V AGP 3.0 card. And every motherboard which claimed to be an AGP 3.0 motherboard turned out to be a universal 1.5V AGP 3.0 motherboard. It makes sense, if your think about it, because if anyone actually shipped a consumer-oriented product which supported only 0.8 volts, they would end up with lots of confused customers and a support nightmare. In the consumer market, you'd have to be crazy to ship a 0.8 volt only product."

    I have a:

    VIA KT333 (VT8367)
    Universal AGP Motherboard (but some implementations are AGP 1.5V Motherboard)

    The card I'm looking at is:

    NVIDIA GeForce 6600
    Universal 1.5V AGP 3.0 Card

    And according to a chart on the page that combination should work. "Works at 1.5V"
  • MAGICMAGIC Doot Doot Furniture City, Michigan Icrontian
    edited September 2005
    cool, nice research on the topic :thumbsup:
Sign In or Register to comment.