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8x AGP for Dual Processing Systems?
Paul E. Loeb asks: "I am wondering if there are any solutions out there that will allow the use of an 8x AGP bus with dual processing support. I prefer AMD Athlon MP, but Xeon would be fine as well. I am looking to build a high-end graphics and video editing system, and I don't want to submit to a single Intel or AMD processor. I do however wish to use a Radeon 9700 or GeForce FX, but that would be pretty pointless at a 4x bus. Thank you in advance for all of your advice."
I do however wish to use a Radeon 9700 or GeForce FX, but that would be pretty pointless at a 4x bus
Not according to most benchmarks I've seen. The AGP speed mainly comes into play when the VRAM can't hold all the textures, and the card has to go to main memory. When that happens, performance will suck no matter the AGP speed, but that should be very rare with the 128MB either of those cards would pack. 8x makes a negligible difference in benchmarks of current PC games. In other words, don't make AGP 8x a sticking point in a system that meets all your other needs.
For great justice.
Do you have some special requirement for AGP 8X? From every review I have ever read (and that's a lot), AGP 8X is simply a marketing thing. Nvidia and ATI hyped it all up, but the performance on the current GPU chipsets doesn't even require it yet, or even come close for that matter. You might be talking a 3% performance boost in some cases, so you're wasting your time trying to find a board with this requirement at this point in time. If I were you, I'd be more worried about finding a dual AMD solution with a 333 FSB, now THAT would get you some serious performance increases - running DDR 333 synchronously with an Athlon MP @333!
This is largely due to the fact that as of late last year, Intel multiprocessing solutions have become cheaper than their AMD counterparts. Intel has reduced lower-end Xeon pricing as faster Xeons have come out. AMD has not done the same with Athlon MP prices. And so Tyan, MSI, Asus et al. are not spending much time thinking about how to keep their Athlon MP motherboard line up to date.
This is just a guess, but it might also have something to do with some bad blood between AMD and manufacturers: the most recent AMD chipset for dual Athlon MP's (760MPX-based) had a bug in the Southbridge that completely disabled on-board USB 1.1 (oops) and it took AMD a while to get a fix into production motherboards. That probably didn't earn them big points.
why not get a "heavyweight" gfx card like the new Nvidia Quadro FX 1/2000 card. It will provide you with the necessary throuput to handle some serious 3D work, movie editing and give you a year or so of obsolescency protection.
Or better yet get one of these babies!
Right now, you will not see much, if any, difference in performance between AGP 4X and AGP 8X...
How can you make this statement: "but that would be pretty pointless at a 4x bus." (note: you probably you meant ON, not at)
/dev/null, however, if you are seriously looking for a graphics workstation and thing AGP 8x is the bus to lust for, think again.
Look, if you want an SMP gaming box, this question should be automatically relegated to
I've had the pleasure of using high end Sun and SGI workstations here and there. While they may not have the fill rate of their gaming friends, they have many, many "work smart, not hard" accelerations available to them that matter in the professional circuit. I would think that any serious graphics capabilities would be best served by an SGI box, and believe me, they don't get AGP So, if you are into MCAD/MCAE, Digital Mockup (DMU) , 3D Animation, Medical Imaging, Scientific Visualization, Oil and Gas (seismic interpretation), Visual Simulation, Editing and Compositing and Geospatial Imaging, you probably aren't the type to need to ask Slashdot where to buy a PC for any of these applications, many of which don't even run on PC architecture. It was a very recent thing where PC cards could even be competitive with professional cards in terms of brute forcing past the elegant hardware accelerations available to professional cards. No one with a professional 3d card on a real workstation feels bad because their metrics don't include Mad Onion/Future Mark 3DMark 2009 XP White Zinfandel Platinum Edition Build 1048576.
You need a dual gaming-only box Why? Why? Just get a single p4-3.06 HT and a Radeon 9700. Believe my, even if it doesn't have AGP 8x, its going to make no more than 5% difference. And who the hell cares about 5% when frame rates are coming out at two times the monitors refresh rate? Who cares?
If you are not a pure gamer, but do other things that fit the gamer archetype like ripping DIVX, then you probably want a fast integer rig for consumer operating systems like Windows XP, then get a Dual 2.8GHz Xeon with an ATI or Nvidia or even a Matrox Parhelia (a popular "professional" card due to 3 heads). Most of the professional PC cards require AGP Pro 110, so that's the slot you would be looking for, Pro 110 is a far more important consideration than AGP 8x. (110 being the watts that the slot can dish out).
I think this is a consumer grade Photoshop / Premiere / Lightwave / Bryce / QuickTime / DiVX / MPEG box. That is the "gamer" category as far as I'm concerned, and for any of those applications, AGP 8x makes no difference.
Don't be looking for Raytheon to start using junk PCs in simulations for any of the military grade stuff they design, it just isn't happening. Microsoft = consumer grade, Nvidia = consumer grade. Just because the really high end stuff is priced beyond the reach of consumers doesn't mean its junk.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
I would expect in most application benchmarks you'll see the difference in benchmarks of agp 4x and 8x being vanishingly close to zero at this time but yuor mileage may vary, especially if you're a doom3 developer... ;)
Anyway supermicro makes such a board, the super X5DAL-TG which also has serial ata and gigabit ethernet so it's probably a niceish board even if it's outside my price range...