Any hope for decent AGP support on any Nforce4?

[Schadenfroh]

my $400 6800GT is going to go to waist, or im gonna have to get nforce3, anyone know if a manufacturer will make a bridge solution to provide an AGP port?

 

[Gamingphreek]

From what i hear on the various forums it isn't looking good. Guru3d is talking about the same thing. I hear that it causes instability and can potentially damage the HW in question. Can anyone verify this?

-Kevin

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek
From what i hear on the various forums it isn't looking good. Guru3d is talking about the same thing. I hear that it causes instability and can potentially damage the HW in question. Can anyone verify this?

-Kevin

Yes, yes I can

Text That at least applies to the implementation used by Gigabyte with the 915P anyways.

 

[jose]

Looks like my best upgrade path is the NForce3 dual Operton platform. I too have a 6800GT.. but that's no so bad of an upgrade ??

Regards,
Jose

 

[Peter]

If it goes to waist, it's at least being decorative, dangling from your forearm

Seriously, board designers technically would be free to slap an AMD 8151 HT-AGP tunnel in front of the NForce4 chip, to implement AGP alongside PCIE. I wouldn't expect that to happen on an affordable mainboard though.

 

[Schadenfroh]

^, just to make sure

 

[AnnoyedGrunt]

Is there really any point to NF4, other than PCIe? From what I've seen, it's pretty much an NF3 with PCIe, so there wouldn't be much point in making NF4 for AGP.

Sure you get some networking stuff that hasn't seemed to work too well on NF3 anyway, and I guess there is the chance you would have 10 USB ports instead of 8, but I don't think there is really that much critical new stuff.

EDIT - Those bridge solutions are terrible BTW. They are basically emulating a 1X AGP slot by going through one of the PCI paths. There was an article when the intel boards first came out, and the gaming performance was pretty bad.

-D'oh!

 

[Peter]

THOSE bridge solutions are awful, just using the fact that AGP is essentially PCI, and running the AGP card on 33 MHz PCI. AMD's HyperTransport architecture lets you combine any kind and number of PROPER bus bridges for the REAL thing, as the board designer pleases.

You can slap an AMD 8131 dual-PCI-X tunnel in front of anyone's existing AGP chipset, just as well as you can combine their 8151 AGP tunnel with any of the forthcoming PCIE chipsets. Or combine the forthcoming HT-PCIE tunnel from ALi with an existing AGP chipset. Or with a PCIE chipset for even more PCIE links. All of those possibilities gets you the full capability on any connection you implement, no pretend-AGP on PCI bus.