• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

AGP compatibility question

hunterjwizzard

hunterjwizzard

Veteran Member
Joined
Mar 21, 2020
Messages
2,083
Dumb question but how important is AGP compatibility?

I found a GeForce 6600 AGP recently. It has windows 98 drivers. I want to shove it in a 550mhz PIII Dell XPS T450 from my collection. The 6600 uses an external molex power source.

Before I do this, is it a mistake?
 
Unless the slot keying doesn't match the card (like with PCI there was 3.3 and 5v keyed cards) the external molex power is to help cards whose power draw exceeds the AGP spec.
 
I would expect companies like Dell and NVidia to follow the rules, so if it fits, it should be compatible. But I don't own that particular dell, so I cannot confirm or deny.

wikipedia says that there might be some cards and slots that do not follow the rules.
en.wikipedia.org

Accelerated Graphics Port - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
HAVHbbP.jpeg


Top card: BGF 6600
Bottom Card: Geforce 2 taken from the system.

Seems like the keying is the same.
 
Annnnnnnd no post on the BFG. /sad face emoji. Posting fine on the old card.

I am going to dump my bin for a different AGP card for this machine but clearly the BFG 6600 is not it.
 
There's something to be said about having some kind of balance between the GPU you have in a system and the CPU anyway. Honestly, I'd say a GeForce2 (as long as its a *real* GeForce2, not an MX) is probably about what a 550mhz Pentium III deserves.
 
It is what is deserves, but lacks a digital output. This machine is my test-bed, it makes a better testbed if I I can plug it into my flat screen monitors without an adapter.

I ended up slotting a Geforce 5200. Which I know is a crappy card on many levels. But it has a DVI-out.
 
Turns out the Geforece2 comes in a DVI version and they aren't expensive. So I'll grab one of those at some point.
 
Both of your 6600GT cards are universally keyed, so they will fit in 1x/2x slots, universal slots and 4x/8x slots. But like Jafir said earlier, just because it fits, doesn't mean it's guaranteed to work. There were a whole lot of cards that used universal keying when they really shouldn't have. In some cases, putting the card into the wrong slot can damage the card, the motherboard, or both.

That being said, you have an extra level of nonsense to deal with. The 6600GT is not actually an AGP GPU, it uses a PCIe to AGP bridge chip, which is what is under the second large heatsink on the lower right of the GPU heatsink. This bridge chip is very temperamental and is known to have pretty poor compatibility. It certainly wasn't designed to be used in ancient AGP machines like you're trying to do, it has the best odds of working in an AGP 4x/8x board. AMD did this same thing with their HD46x0 AGP cards and had similar incompatibility issues. I think the HD3850 AGP also used a bridge chip and had the same problems.

And a further level of nonsense is the VGA ROM. The code in the VGA Option ROM may use x86 code that is not supported by the PIII, and require a Pentium 4 or Athlon/Athlon 64 to work.
 
I'm gonna try the 6600 in a P4 system next.

I did successfully get an AGOP 6800 to work under Windows 98 on a different P4 system. Fingers crossed.
 
I’ll bet it works great in a P4. I’ve got an AGP GeForce 7600GT in a Dell Optiplex GX270, which is a P4. I’m not a gamer, but I seem to recall it’s works pretty well. But my card, and the slot it goes into are keyed for 1.5V.
 
Just beware that the DVI ports on a lot of old Nvidia products came directly out of cereal boxes. (Thinking stuff released before the Geforce 4 era.) They're okay for driving old 1280x1024 monitors, but I vaguely remember some weird compatibility glitches with them. But of course that was a long time ago.

GiGaBiTe said:
That being said, you have an extra level of nonsense to deal with. The 6600GT is not actually an AGP GPU, it uses a PCIe to AGP bridge chip, which is what is under the second large heatsink on the lower right of the GPU heatsink. This bridge chip is very temperamental and is known to have pretty poor compatibility.
Click to expand...

I'd agree that cards from that transitional era where the chipset would natively be one standard and they'd slap some glue on it to adapt it to the other often suck and you're generically better off sticking with chips that are actually native to whatever slot your PC has... but it is a roll of the dice. Some machine/OS combinations have no problems, others hate them.

But I mean, let's be honest here, this Dell XPS T450 is a 440BX chipset. That is old school as AGP goes. I have fond memories of the BX, especially in light of the trash Intel coughed up to replace it, but expecting it to work well with an end-of-days AGP card like that is probably on the optimistic side.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Just beware that the DVI ports on a lot of old Nvidia products came directly out of cereal boxes. (Thinking stuff released before the Geforce 4 era.) They're okay for driving old 1280x1024 monitors, but I vaguely remember some weird compatibility glitches with them. But of course that was a long time ago.
Click to expand...
I only need 1024x768. It just happens that a natively-digital signal is preferable to one I have to run through a converter to display on the big screen. That being said my new switcher does have some amazing ATD capabilities so maybe the geforce2 will be back.

I've also got a Matrox g450(or something like that) which has driver support all the way back to windows 3.1, so that might be a better choice for the testbed approach.

Eudimorphodon said:
But I mean, let's be honest here, this Dell XPS T450 is a 440BX chipset. That is old school as AGP goes. I have fond memories of the BX, especially in light of the trash Intel coughed up to replace it, but expecting it to work well with an end-of-days AGP card like that is probably on the optimistic side.
Click to expand...
Yeah. I'm not really complaining that it doesn't work. It was mostly just an "I need an AGP card with DVI. This one is sitting here staring at me." whim.

This dell has been a nice little workhorse. I had my Voodoo3 in it for a while. That geforce2 is one of the oldest cards in terms of time I've owned it. I bought it in highschool and played Morrowind on it(though in an XP machine with an athlon CPU).
 
All this agp talk now has me wondering. What was the fastest AGP card that was actually AGP and not PCIe with an AGP bridge?
 
It's hard to know because in the dying days of AGP, both Nvidia and ATI released sub models of their GPU ASICs with official AGP support, and they also made bridge chips that went in both directions. PCIe adapted GPUs were released long after AGP motherboards stopped being offered. AGP was pretty much dead and gone by 2006, but the HD4650/70 had AGP variants released in September of 2008. Nvidia had the 7950GT in April of 2007, but that wasn't officially supported, it was only offered by a few board vendors using bridge chips.

I'm going to say that the Geforce 6800 Ultra (NV40) is probably the last official AGP GPU from Nvidia, and the Radeon x850 XT (R360) for ATI.

www.techpowerup.com

NVIDIA NV40 GPU Specs

16 Pixel Shaders, 6 Vertex Shaders, 16 TMUs, 16 ROPs
www.techpowerup.com www.techpowerup.com
www.techpowerup.com

ATI Radeon X850 XT AGP Specs

ATI R481, 520 MHz, 16 Pixel Shaders, 6 Vertex Shaders, 16 TMUs, 16 ROPs, 256 MB GDDR3, 540 MHz, 256 bit
www.techpowerup.com www.techpowerup.com

The easiest way to tell whether a card is a true AGP card or not is the presence of a bridge chip. If it has one, it's just a PCIe GPU smurfing as an AGP GPU.
 
I in fact have that 6800. I may have to hunt down a 1.4ghz Tualatin to pair it with for the absolute max fastest win98 system.

Of course that's kind of pointless. The only games that would benefit from such a reved up machine probably also run fine under WinXP where the advent of PCIe blows that performance out of the water.

But have I mentioned recently that I am bored?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top