hey all, this might sound like other posts asking whatis the difference between agp 4x/8x speeds. I did my research and learned that currently no card uses the agp 8x bandwith and there is basically no difference between these two speeds. My mobo only supports 4x so I was wondering whether buying agp 8x board would DARASTICALLY imporve my graphics performance. Please explain. thanks, gigz

If you motherboard only supports 4X, that is all you will get. Getting an 8x video card wont be a bad thing as you will get the benifit if you ever get a motherboard that does support 8X. Stuart

There is some apples & oranges incorrectness in this explanation, but oh well. If you upgrade your mobo and memory to 500mhz (4 GB/s) that would speed your system up. But would 1000mhz memory (8 GB/s) further speed you up? Maybe not. As the memory speed gets super high it becomes overkill since the cpu becomes the weak link. At some point, faster memory does not help. That's why they invented the cpu multiplier in the first place. When the cpu and memory and mobo all ran at 60mhz, the memory speed was overkill until they could make the cpu faster. That's where we are right now in terms of agp bandwidth versus vid card gpus. The bandwidth is overkill. So for grins let's say that 4 GB/s is the overkill point on a 2 ghz cpu, a 2:1 ratio of bandwidth to cpu ghz. Your vid card cpu gets its data from the northbridge. So if you think of the northbridge as the "memory" for the gpu, at some point that memory speed becomes overkill because the gpu is the weak link. Well the fastest gpu is about 500mhz right now, so the question becomes what agp rate gets you 1GB/s of bandwidth (2:1 ratio of agp bandwidth to gpu mhz)? Answer: agp4x! (agp8x is 2.1 GB/s) And this is aside the point that the vid card has memory right on the card already, further reducing the odds that the northbridge communication would be a bottleneck. The vid card memory is like cpu cache in this analogy, but there is hundreds of times as much of it. So it adds up to the current state of affairs where agp bandwidth is more than we need.

So then you mean the New PCI-Express x16 will be absoultely useless? Anyways, 8X AGP will still beneifit from 4X AGP. The difference will be less than 1-2%. I understand the external bus being bottleneck, eg. Northbridge, South Bridge... etc. But still, when you play high texture games, bandwidth becomes useful in this area as more data being transfered from AGP bus to the video card itself. For example, when you play Quake III with geforce 4 MX 440 vs geforce 4 Ti4200 at 640x480, the difference will be marginal. But as you increase the resolution, things get change, why, because Geforce 4 Ti4200 offers more memory bandwidth than Geforce 4 MX 440. This same applies to AGP 8X. Why we need such high bandwidth? Because its for future purpose. When those high textured games come out like DOOM III, Gun Mental, 4X AGP will overload due to the fact that too many data being from the AGP bus, but 8X AGP will solve the problem. Why do you think Nvidia and ATI makes 8X AGP Geforce FX 5950 Ultra and Radeon 9800 XT, why not stick with 4X or 2X? Look at it this way, you have a 2 way freeway and your the only one drving out there. It doesn't matter if its 8 way, 16 way, 999999 way, still you can't go beyond your car's limit. But as more cars getting into the 2 way freeway, you will start to slow down due to the fact that the freeway is overcrowded with cars. But on a 4-way freeway, you get noticeble improvement. On a 16 way freeway, even though its the rush hour for the day, the chance of getting trafic jam in 16-way freeway is absoulte less than 8-way, 4-way, 2-way. Now we just can't fully use the 8X AGP, but its for future use. Now because we have more and more people driving cars, so we need to make the freeway wider just to ensure smooth trafic flow, like the AGP bus theory. Correct me if im wrong on this one. TMP