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Other Uses for an AGP Slot?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the gfx-cards-have-gone-PCIx dept.

SleepyHappyDoc asks: "AGP seems to be going the way of the dinosaur, but there's still a lot of slots on legacy motherboards out there. If you don't have need for the graphical advantages of AGP (say, on a headless server), what else could you use the AGP slot for? Could the advantages of AGP over PCI be leveraged in a use other than graphics cards?"

4 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. VRAM Storage Device by dastrike · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well, this still involves to use a graphics card, but in a bit different way.

    1. Acquire a cheapo graphics card with lots of memory, e.g some low-end NVIDIA or ATI with 256 megs
    2. Read and apply VRAM Storage Device - How to use the memory on GFX board in a different way...
    3. You have a bunch of memory that can be used for a ramdisk type of device or swap space

    YMMV with the performance though.

    --
    while true; do eject; eject -t; done
  2. Re:There was this project ... by jnik · · Score: 5, Informative

    GPGPU is what you're looking for.

  3. /dev/null by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 5, Funny

    As it is write only, it is ideal for implementing a hardware /dev/null on Unix systems.

    --
    Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
  4. Re:Not a lot by DRJlaw · · Score: 5, Interesting

    AGP is a one-way architecture - the motherboard sends data to the graphics card, the graphics card processes it and sends it to the monitor. The limitations of this way of working are why dual graphics card solutions were never practical on AGP once you started increasing the complexity of the data - the bus wasn't capable enough.

    No.

    AGP is a two-way, point to point architecture that has a single master and a single target. Data can be written to and read from the graphics card memory, but you can't exercise the full range of PCI I/O operations. The data transfer rates are asymmetric, with sending data to the card greatly favored over reading data from the card, but they are most certainly two-way.

    The SLI argument is a lesser error, if you would even call it that. You could have, but never as far as I know actually did have two AGP busses in a system. Thus I suspect that it would have been possible to do SLI with AGP, especially when you consider that existing implementations of SLI require an additional card-to-card link, which means (likely, this last part is speculation) that there is very little return data being transmitted from the cards back to the PCI express switch beyond that which you would see in a single card system, whether it is PCI express based or AGP based.