AGP SLOT

AGP SLOT

Accelerated Graphics Port

  is an interface specification that enables graphics to display quickly on ordinary personal computers. A new bus has arrived on the PC. It is called AGP (Advanced Graphics Port). It is exclusively

designed for video cards

AGP will probably not be in widespread use before 1998. Amongst other things, the system must

be supported by the operating system (Windows 98). Likewise, it is claimed that the system bus

will be raised from the current 66 MHZ to 100 MHZ, to allow AGP to prove its worth. AGP

includes several techniques, of which two are understandable:

l   PCI version 2.1 with 66 MHZ bus frequency. That is a doubling of transfer speed

Possibility to utilize system board RAM for texture cache. This will reduce RAM card

demand in connection with the most demanding programs.

l   

One big AGP advantage is that the PCI bus is relieved of work with graphics data. It can

concentrate on other demanding transport duties, like transfer to and from network adapter and

disk drives.

Here you see the AGP-socket at the bottom. It looks like a PCI-socket, but it has been placed in

a different position on the board. In the top you see two (black) ISA-sockets. Then four (white)

PCI-sockets, and then the brown AGP-socket:

An easy-read and illustrated Guide to the EIDE, Ultra DMA and AGP interfaces.