AGP Compatibility question

[Guest]

Hi,

This is my first post in this community so please be gentle!

I have a system containing a Microstar MS6167 motherboard, AMD Athlon 700MHz processor and a Hercules 3D Prophet video card (using the NVidia GeForce chip I think).

The problem is that the graphics card is on the point of expiring - it displays dark shaded lines across the screen. At first I thought it was the monitor, but other machines display fine on it, and using the faulty card with a different monitor shows the same problem of shading.

My question is this. The motherboard supports only AGP 1.0 but almost all cards now available are AGP 2.0 or 4.0. Can I use these cards in my machine with this motherboard? Is there any point in doing so? Am I looking at having to upgrade the motherboard just to install a newer graphics card? (I really don't want to do this!) Can I flash the BIOS to provide support for newer versions of AGP?

The machine is mainly used for office type applications, but I do play some games on it and also plan to use it for video editing as well. I was thinking of getting something like a GeForce 2 MX400. As I plan to upgrade to an LCD monitor in the future I would also like a DVI output on my new graphics card.

Thanks for your help.

Cheers,

Charles Berger.

 

[Harisahmed]

You definetly want to read up on the graphic cards that you are thinking about purchasing. Most cards are backward compatible to a certain extent (I remember seeing that some new cards only go down to 2x), but you would be killing most of the performance benefit of buying the card. You are probably better off upgrading your system. Unlike some of the speed freaks that post around most of these types of forums, I'm running a P3 450 with a TNT card. I'm waiting until either the end of this year or sometime early next year to just upgrade to a new system.

 

[Oracle]

Your motherboard supports AGP 2X, so any card that supports AGP 2X is fine (and that includes most GeForce2 MX400 cards).

<font color=red>Floppy disk?!? What the heck's a floppy disk?!?</font color=red>

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your reply. Can you tell me where you saw that the mobo supports AGP 2 as I'm sure my documentation says it doesn't.

Cheers,

Charles.

 

[Oracle]

http://www.msi.com.tw/support/manual/manual.php?model=MS-6167



<font color=red>Floppy disk?!? What the heck's a floppy disk?!?</font color=red>

 

[Willamette_sucks]

i can understand you dont want to do a major upgrade, but if all you want is a new vid card, and your mobo only supports 1x, then even if its backward compatable its not going to run that fast. trust me an athlon mobo is cheap and so are the geforce 2's you can get BOTH for less than 200 so why not??? plus a new mobo will support even more future things than yours right now does and will probably last you a long time considering your processor class (athlon) goes much higher than you have. what i mean is if you get a new mobo and vid card, you wont have to get a new mobo for a long time cause your new one would support up to at least a 1.4 ghz athlon and maybe even the XP's depending.

its not that intel CANT make a good processor, its that they just dont try

 

[Codfish]

Just get a card (min. geforce2 ti) with 64Mb onboard RAM. It doesn't matter if you run it at AGP1x, 2x or 4x the preformance difference will be negligible between 4x & 1x since the textures will load onto the onboard RAM & the AGP bus won't even touch system RAM.