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Gold/Mining/Energy : Day trading in Canada -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: keith massey who wrote (1811)	12/13/1998 10:31:00 PM
From: the Chief	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4467

I bought the ASUS P2B 440BX board with the new Anti Boot Virus BIOS? They say I can change the Bios? But my fear level in adjusting this, is directly proportional to my fear of alligators!! the Chief

To: keith massey who wrote (1811)	12/13/1998 11:19:00 PM
From: Chad Barrett	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4467

<< As for PCI to AGP....there is a major difference!! Although the cards may be the same the AGP card will run on average 2-3 times faster than the same PCI card. The bus on the AGP slot is specially designed to send video faster. >> I have never heard this before Keith?? Could you point me towards where you got this info?? I hope it wasn't from a "salesperson".... or else he/she did a great sales job on you!! AGP graphics cards usually won't improve performance over PCI graphics cards by more than 10%. The AGP cards primary added feature is that it provides a "fast pipeline" between the graphics card and your RAM. What this means is that if your graphics card has 8 Megs of RAM on it, but the current graphics require more than 8, the graphics card can patch in to the regular RAM on your computer and use it to help display graphics. When buying an AGP card, it is important to note what type of AGP it supports! AGP comes in various "speeds". 1X AGP pretty much just means that you have a PCI card that will fit in an AGP slot. 2X AGP will provide minimal improvements over the same PCI card. 4X will start to provide significant improvements. However, I don't know of any AGP cards that support 4X AGP yet?? Most tend to be 2X AGP right now. The 1X, 2X and 4X refers to the speed at which the graphics card can "talk" to the RAM in your computer. Don't take this as "fact" (because it has been a while since I read this stuff)... but I believe that 1X communicates at 256K, 2X at 512K, and 4X at 1024K. The problem with 1X and 2X is that the communication path to the RAM is still too slow to really get much benefit from using the computer's RAM to display large graphics. It would be just as fast for the video card to process the image in "chunks" itself (the large image would take several processing cycles on the video card). AGP will truly be useful once 4X AGP and up graphics cards are on the market. Right now AGP is most helpful for people viewing large graphics or using large spreadsheets, etc. I believe a good site to read up on AGP would be "Tom's Hardware Guide" tomshardware.com It is an amazing source of information when it comes to computer components (processors, graphics cards, motherboards, RAM, etc...) At this point in time AGP is essentially a marketing ploy by Intel (who inventing AGP)... My guess is that they wanted to introduce AGP just to get it established as the "norm", even though it isn't truly a large improvement yet. Future AGP devices will take advantage of the possibilities though, and at that point AGP will be a useful new technology. Chad

To: keith massey who wrote (1811)	12/14/1998 1:03:00 AM
From: keith massey	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4467

the AGP card will run on average 2-3 times faster than the same PCI card I would like to now take back this misleading and incorrect statement. It's a good thing that people are out ready to correct my ignorance. I was under the impression that during "absolute peak" performance the theoretical larger bandwidths of AGP allowed for far better performance compared to PCI cards. This wasn't from a sales person but a tech friend of mine who rarely stears me wrong. I had also read a couple of research article put out by companies saying statements like: The theoretical bandwidths of AGP and PCI are 533 MB/sec and 133 MB/sec, respectively. With existing systems, we can demonstrate greater than 330 MB/sec through AGP. Due to contention with other devices on the PCI bus and the lack of pipelining, PCI offers roughly 80 MB/sec. Even without using any of the extra features of AGP, the AGP bus runs at 66 MHz and the PCI bus runs at 33 MHz so AGP provides double the data rate I have now done a little more reading on the subject after your posts and see the errors in my ways. However Chief and I both have AGP and PCI cards. Although the AGP card may not be 2-3 times faster they still appears to be slightly faster. I don't see why you wouldn't want the AGP card as your primary card if you already had one?? In my defense on statements of AGP - taken from Tom's Hardware AGP Texturing Becoming More Important This brings me right to the next interesting topic. It seems as if the star of the AGP incapable 3Dfx products Voodoo2 and Voodoo Banshee is due to fall within the next 3-6 months. Finally AGP texturing is becoming really important, the first applications that use a large amount of high resolution textures will hit the shelves pretty soon. Gabe Newell, Managing Director of Valve L.L.C., the game developer company that will bring us the highly impressive ‘Half-Life' 3D action game and Quake Arena competitor, was giving his opinion on future 3D texture demands. He made clear that the biggest problem with 3D accelerators is the texturing issue, whilst he was satisfied with the polygon and fill rate of the latest 3D accelerators. Half-Life will be using about 40 MB of textures and this although the amount of textures and thus the level of detail has already been reduced, so that the game can run on 3Dfx chipset cards. It is certainly not in our interest that the visual detail of a 3D game is reduced only because 3Dfx can't supply an AGP implementation. S3's high texture Q2 level ‘newS3' and the according demo ‘mon2.dm2' have already shown that AGP can indeed become an issue and NVIDIA's RIVA TNT is the current leader in AGP performance. Half-Life has the potential of becoming a very successful 3D game and it wouldn't surprise me if Quake Arena should also use a much larger amounts of high resolution textures than Quake 2 does right now. This could have a serious impact on the sales of the current Best Regards KEITH