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AGP and PCIe on one board!! (Biostar NF4UL-A9 )

I

imported_Woody

Senior member
This board just came out apparently and is priced very low. It's NF4 Ultra and includes both AGP and PCIe graphics card slots. First I've seen of this kind. I'm not sure about the Biostar brand and have no experience with them but it's an intriguing idea to have this kind of flexibility. Doesn't say if you can use both slots simultaneously and there don't seem to be any reviews of this product anywhere.

I'd love to hear some information on any experience anyone has had either with this board or this brand in general. I also wonder if any other manufacturers are planning similar products.

If ASUS, MSI, or Gigabyte had something like this that worked as well as other high end NF4 Ultra boards I'd buy it tomorrow. The biggest thing preventing me from upgrading to socket 939 is my fairly new and expensive AGP card and the reluctance to upgrade to another AGP mobo (NF3).

It may be the only NF4 board out there that can run an AGP card.
 
Whoa, I'm in the exact same boat with a 6800nu I picked up at the end of the year for a great price (CUSA deal).

I'd like to do a cpu/mb swap and start migrating, but clearly 939 is the way to go and I'm sold on the NF4. It would be perfect to be able to use the rest of my gear for now and move to PCI-E videocard down the road.

Add me to the list anxious to hear some feedback on this board.

Only $118 at NewEgg
 
I saw an LGA775 board with AGP and PCIe a while back. AGP performance was horrible because it was run off the PCI bus.
 
I don't think that the AGP would run at it's full potential and it's probably just attached to the PCI bus or something like that. I've seen the review on ECS board that's like that and well. The AGP slot is just attached to the PCI bus giving it almost no bandwidth what so ever.
 
I've also seen the LGA775 board, and the AGP is just two PCI slots with an AGP connector. It had terrible performance. You could just get a NF3 board, or a VIA equivilent (don't know the correct name for their AGP chipset).
 
Originally posted by: ts3433
I saw an LGA775 board with AGP and PCIe a while back. AGP performance was horrible because it was run off the PCI bus.
Click to expand...

I think that was an SiS chipset based mother board. Can they put the AGP-PCI-e "Bridge chip" on the motherboard and not the Video card maybe? That would be cool.

 
The only chipsets supporting both AGP and PCI-E natively are the VIA PT880 Pro (Intel platform) and ULI's M1695+M1567 for AMD.

Pictures of ULI's reference board and a Jetway board based on the chipset can be seen here:
http://www.ocworkbench.com/index.stm

nVidia, Intel and SiS don't support both natively, so the mobos on these chipsets can only support PCI-E OR AGP natively. Notice on BIOSTAR's website the "AGP" slot on this mobo is called "XGP", which means it's only compatible with some AGP cards and that it rides on the PCI bus.

This mobo looks interesting. The layout is mostly good, but the apparently poor Vcore circuit is a huge turn-off for me. I also see them using the same northbridge cooling ASUS picked up for their nForce boards. The Chaintech is still the best value nForce4 in my book.
 
The ULi M1695 HT-PCIE tunnel chip could in fact be used in conjunction with anyone's AGP-enabled K8 chipset ... just as well as one could use an M1687 HT-AGP tunnel (aka AMD 8151) with any PCIE-enabled K8 chipset.

Despite these two ways of doing actual AGP alongside PCIE, most of the existing boards are half-arsed jobs that either don't have full 16x PCIE or do "AGP" from the PCI bus.
 
I wouldn't mind picking up a good NF3 board now since at the moment there is no compelling reason to toss away a perfectly good high end AGP graphics card in favor of going to PCIe (SLI aside). In the future when I want to upgrade my X800Pro graphics card to something that hasn't been invented yet a new motherboard would be required but all the rest of my stuff could be used including the CPU and RAM.

Still, it's an extra $130 or so and a lot of effort (gotta rebuild and reinstall) to make such an upgrade.
 
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