Pci Vs Agp

  • Thread starter Thread starter larrye
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larrye

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I need a video card to go in my new ABIT BE6-II MB that I have ordered. It has an AGP slot but I am having trouble finding an AGP card locally for under $75. Would a cheap PCI card work with this board and a P-II processor. Aardvark 24/96 s-card and windows 98. My new board should be here tomorrow and I want to get it in and running. Don't want to wait another 3-4 days for a video card to get here!
Thanks
 
AGP

A pci card will totally slam your pci bus and make it difficult for other stuff to access the bus, particularly bus heavy audio. Get the AGP card, regardless of cost.
 
While I agree that an AGP card would be better, I'm a bit skeptical that a PCI video card would "slam the PCI bus". There are people out there who using second video cards on the PCI bus. Not to mention SCSI controllers etc. I would say if you already have a PCI card go ahead and try it. But if you are going to spend money anyway, chill and wait for a AGP card. There are cheap ones out there by ATI & Trident, not good for games but fine for a DAW.
 
Never install an AGP card in a Windows 95 machine!

No matter what anyone tells you, Windows 95 cannot handle the resource conflicts caused by an AGP card. It might appear to function, but go to your device manager and open the properites for you display adapters. You'll see a ton of conflicted resources. You can spend hours trying to sort them out, but you will not fully succeed. You PCI steering will always be the bug a boo.

Either upgrade to 98, ME or 2000 if you insist on an AGP card.

These OS's will handle the AGP adapter with no problem.

Hope this helps you.
 
Order from the net and save yourself a bunch of money. Go to Pricewatch.com, click on Video Cards, Voodoo3. The cheapest ones on the list will be the Voodoo3 2000 for about $30-40. I've got one in my machine at work (actually a V3 1000, the OEM version of the same card) and it's pretty good. It's even decent for games. Nothing like a GeForce2 or Radeon, but you can't beat it for $30.
 
works for me

Hey there -

I have a PIII 600 running win98 with an Aardvark Direct Pro and a Riva 8mb AGP card and an ATI PCI video card. I have no problems running audio w/ a ton of realtime effects etc.. It is nice to have the other monitor to out the Aardvark control panel in.

lD
 
Krakit - with all due respect, that stuff about Win95 is nonsense. I'm supporting a building with over 200 computers in it and probably 100 of them are using AGP cards with Windows 95. Both ATI and Trident chipsets. They do not have conflicts.

On ANY motherboard using AGP and PCI slots you have to be aware that some slots will share IRQs. If the motherboard manual is good (i.e. ASUS) it will usually tell you which slots share. Most cards deal with resource sharing, some do not. Paying attention to which slot you use is a good idea.

In any event I have no problem telling people still using Windows 95 that they are better off upgrading to a newer OS.

And regarding Voodo cards, while $30 is a tempting price you need to be aware that they are out of business so driver updates will not be coming. Also it has been reported that Voodo cards have some compatability issues with the updated AGP slots coming out on the newest motherboards. I have two Voodo 3000 cards and they work great, but I don't think I would buy one today for any price.
 
Respect right back atya RWhite

But I currently support 200 computers too. All of them had AGP cards in them when I was hired. They also all had little problems with GPF's and other interesting and varied error messages.

When you open the device manager you will NOT see any indication that there is a problem with the display adapter.

However, if you open the display adpater properties and look at the resources tab you will see that there are resource conflicts of the memory type.

This causes a lot of mysterious program error messages.

I have had experience with this before at my previous position

(A healthcare facility with over 2000 computers) and the solution is to replace the AGP adapter with a PCI card. This has been done at the company where I work (at my urging) and the eratic behavior of these machines has been completely eradicated for over 10 months now.

I do not believe that is a coincedence.

:D :cool:
 
I have found this interesting item.

Click this to go to ATI's webiste for their AGP support for Win95

It appears that if you upgrade Win95 to the nth degree, you can use an AGP card.:o

Of course it's too late to do that here since all our machines have been outfitted with PCI now. Why they had AGP in the first place is way beyond me. :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:

However, this document was not at my disposal 10 months ago when this was an issue and since we spent less than MicroSoft's fee for OS2.x on PCI cards it still all worked out in the end.

So, I'm willing to meet you halfway on this if you are, RWhite.

In any case, upgrade above 95 if you want to use an AGP card. You'll just be happier that way, I promise.

:D :D :D ;)
 
Interesting post. Most of our remining Win95 systems are OSR 2.5 ("C") and thus are, according to ATI anyway, getting their full AGP performance. We do have a collection of systems using version A however. We bought out another company that was going under. We got their business and employees but not their PCs, so we needed to move the contents of their systems to new computers. Of course they had all sorts of important software which they had lost all or parts of the install disks for. So I had to transfer the complete Win95A setups from old Pentium 100 systems to new PIII computers with all different hardware. What a fun experiance. Anyway they are all working, although quite possibly not getting full AGP speed. But no unusual number of crashes either.

And like I said, we agree that upgrading from Win 95 is a good idea.
 
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