VeeshanVault

My P4T and Geforce 3 (pre-Ti nomenclature) combo has served me well for the last 3 or so years. Now, however, the time has come to upgrade my gaming experience. I see that the hot new cards all use AGP8x, while my P4T only has an AGP4x slot.

If I put an ATI x800 XT card into my 4x AGP slot, will I be totally wasting my money? Or would I see a marked improvement?

You can get some decent 8x cards that will also run in a 4x. I think I have a 256meg ATI 9600Pro in one of my systems (can't remember which one I finally decided on) and with the software you can choose which you want it to run on based on what your board will support.

I don't think there's really any software today (except for extreme benchmarks / demos) that actually utilize the 8xAGP.

There are so many other bottlenecks in the graphics process that you need a bleeding edge system to saturate the 4x bus, and I doubt any machines presently come even close to saturating an 8xAGP port.

Found some test scores that show a 1.67% increase from 4x AGP to 8x AGP - not exactly a huge difference. (an old link, but still apt: http://ausmodders.com/modules.php?op=mo ... ntent&id=9 )

So in summation: Any limitation on performance from your new card will not be from the 4x AGP port on your mobo.

One thing you should note is that *some* - very few - motherboards that don't support 8xAGP actually have a power problem, because they supply the wrong voltage.

I found this out to my detriment at work when my boss bought new cards without checking the motherboards...

Read this link! http://www.neoseeker.com/Hardware/faqs/kb/10,63.html

Hum. I'll check into it. Thanks guys!