Computer upgrading

[DoomITP]

My computer is a bit old and I intend to get an AGP graphics card for it. What I want to know is how to tell what kind of AGP slot I have and what kind of AGP slot the graphics card uses.


Thank you. :smallsmile:

[factotum]

AGP is a particular kind of graphics card slot, and unless your machine is really, really ancient, it won't use it. Any more modern machine should have PCI-Express.

Having said that, you'd probably not recognise the differences between AGP and PCI-E unless you'd seen them before; easiest way might be to find out what model motherboard you've got. If you download and run CPU-Z (http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html) it has a "Mainboard" tab that will give you this information (e.g. mine is an ASUSTek M4A785D-M PRO), and if you post that here we should be able to find out what expansion options it has.

[Erloas]

For the most part if your computer is AGP its not worth upgrading at all because generally everything else is well out of date too. And there is no part you can upgrade without upgrading everything.
The other main problem is that very few people make AGP cards any more and the very few you can find are more expensive for less power.

However if it comes to it, and you are in the US, I happen to have an AGP ATI X1950Pro card sitting on my desk, which isn't great but its pretty good for an AGP card. I would sell it for next to nothing because I have no use for it any more.

[DoomITP]

Actually other than my graphics card, I have an extremely good computer with a very powerful processor and enough RAM to run quite a few games. It's the graphics card that keeps me from playing games.

I have a open AGP card slot at the moment and I just need to know how to tell what kind of cards it would accept. I've heard of multiple speeds when it comes to AGP and because of that I wanted to make sure that I had the right one before I bought anything.

[Kageru]

Do what factotum said and find out the name of your mainboard after that you could just use. But Cpu-Z will probably show you your graphic interface at the bottom of it's mainboard tab.
Though honestly agp is quite outdated, so your mainboard probably supports the newest one.
Anyway what do you want to play? If it's new you might have a problem because even if you find a new decent agp card, your cpu can't be all that good if you didn't buy your agp mainboard when agp was already outdated.
But if they aren't that new I guess you can find an agp card to play them (just don't pay too much for it cause if you ever upgrade again you will probably have to replace everything.)

[Erloas]

Actually other than my graphics card, I have an extremely good computer with a very powerful processor and enough RAM to run quite a few games. It's the graphics card that keeps me from playing games.
As Kageru said, I don't think its possible to have a "very powerful processor" on an AGP motherboard. I know Intel has changed their CPU socket several times since the change from AGP to PCI-E and AMD it was socket 939 during the AGP/PCI-E change over, which has been completely replaced by AM2 for 5-6 years now.
I don't think anyone was making dual core processors before the transition to PCI-E was complete. And any non-dual core processor is simply inadequate for all but the most basic newer games or old games (5+ years probably). And if you are looking at straight clock rate just keep in mind that newer processors are much more efficient per clock tick then older ones. The transition from P4 to the Core line of processors the Core processor was something like 1.5-2x more efficient per clock cycle so a 3.4GHz P4 was routinely beat by a 2GHz Core processor.


As for AGP it was really pretty backwards compatible with its own upgrades. AGP went to version 3, but you could mix and match them, it would just run at the speed of whichever was lower, the card or the motherboard. Though there was a few changes, any older card would work in a newer slot, but some of the newer cards were longer then the older slots. Although you can pretty much just assume a AGP 3x slot because on the off chance you do have a decent processor it would have had to have been so late into the life of AGP that it would be a 3x Slot.

CPU-Z and GPU-Z should give you most of that information.

[factotum]

I agree with Erloas--a motherboard that actually uses AGP is going to be at least 3 years old now. While it's just about possible you have Socket 775 and thus a Core 2 or other reasonable spec processor, actually finding a halfway decent AGP graphics card would be almost impossible because nobody produces them anymore! The ATI X1950Pro he mentions is a decent card--had one myself for a while--but it's still five years old now and doesn't support any DirectX newer than version 9.

[tyckspoon]

You can get the HD4650 in AGP if you're really serious about trying to make an AGP platform work for more modern games- that's the newest and most powerful AGP interface card I know of. And honestly, almost anything more powerful would probably be bottlenecked by the processors typically found on the older AGP boards these days.