agp express?

[gateT]

Anyone hear of this? "AGP express
Savior for backward compatible purpose when users still have the AGP card. ECS patent design (AGP Guardian) ensures 100 % protection to prevent any AGP 8X/ 4X cards burnt out. The higher performance VGA engine card is, the less performance lose on AGP Exp".

 

[Greenman]

I don't understand what your trying to say. Is this some new piece of hardware?

 

[SynthDude2001]

I think that's one of those "fake" AGP solutions that uses the PCI bus - and provides horrible performance. As far as I know, there's really only one motherboard right now that has a real full-speed AGP slot along with PCI-E slots, that being the ASRock 939Dual-SATA2.

 

[Fern]

Sounds pretty crappy to me.

ECS obviously has been thinking about this issue for a long time, and came to the conclusion that users might be able to live with a "weakened" AGP port for a limited period of time. To this end, the manufacturer decided to provide an AGP-compatible slot based on PCI, by merging the voltage feeds of two slots into the AGP connector. This slot, dubbed AGP Express, is not an enhancement to AGP in any way, but rather a PCI slot physically adapted to look like AGP.

Though it is not quite AGP compliant, AGP Express will work with the majority of AGP cards available. Obviously, AGP Express is not capable of DIME (Direct Memory Execute), the AGP feature responsible for sourcing textures out into main memory. Also, a chipset function named GART (Graphics Address Remapping Table) would be required to take care of graphics memory allocation within the system RAM.

However, the biggest disadvantage of the PCI approach is the fact that bandwidth within a bus is shared with all devices present. Even though the graphics board does most of the heavy lifting in the system, it will never be able to use the PCI bus exclusively.

And this part sounds like BS to me:

The higher performance VGA engine card is, the less performance lose on AGP Exp".

I'd say its the opposite. A "high performance" vga card is gonna be crippled by the bandwithd limitation of the PCI (33mhz) slot.


Fern

 

[gateT]

It looked a little strange to me also.
Nothing like that has been reviewed here at AT as far as I know,that's why I wanted to see if anyone had even heard of it.