AGP and PCI graphic cards

[stevejr]

I didn't know until recently that you can get a graphics card that fits in a pci slot...at least on the older socket A boards. What is the difference, if any, between an AGP card and a PCI card?

One of the shop computers had a bad AGP card...burned out fan and a bulging cap. I went down to the local computer store where we get spare parts and came back with a PCI card...put it in and back in business. I had not noticed until then about the two types of cards so I am curious about them.

Can you believe that we have ( for several years) a 200Mhz Pentium with 64Megs of ram being used as a server that is used to transfer CNC programs from the computer to the CNC machines...and it seems to be working just fine. It has Windows 95 and IE 5.5.,....amazing!! I guess that it doesn't take much to store and transfer basic data such as CNC programs.

[puterfixer]

AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) allows faster data throughput than PCI, needed for rendering faster frame rates in 3D games. For office use, a PCI card will do just fine.

[Train]

There are three main types of video card commonly in use.

PCI Express
AGP
PCI

PCI is slowest and PCI EXpress is the fastest.

http://www.heatonresearch.com/articles/25/page2.html

File servers do not need to be the latest and greatest so, as you found out a older computer can handle the job right nicely. As long as no file excedes 4 GB in size. Which just happens to be a Fat32 limitation.

[stevejr]

Thanks, puterfixer & Train....cleared that up for me. Even though I have a PCIe x16 card in my own machine, I hadn't thought about being able to put a pci card in a system that had an agp slot...I just assumed that that was the only place to put the card...nice to have that option...and in the situation at the shop that worked out just fine. The largest files that are used don't get anywhere near the gigabyte size.

Thanks, again...

[Train]

Your files are small enough then

Glad to be of help!

[Ridgerunr]

Just one more thing that wasn't mentioned. On an AGP board,if you need to use a PCI video card,most boards are set up to use the PCI slot next to the AGP slot for this.

[stevejr]

Ridgerunr....that's interesting...I'll take a look tomorrow and see in which pci slot that I put the card. The board is a micro board so there are only two pci slots available ( I think...maybe 3..I'll find out ).

[stevejr]

Well, I checked the micro board and it only has two pci slots. The vid card is in the second slot so I guess that on this particular board it didn't matter where the vid card went.