ATI cards and out-of-spec AGP bus..

[illusionm8]

im running a p3 700@933 with 133fsb. my abit be6-II agp setting is at 2/3 which is ~ 87 agp bus. i have been running 2 geforce2gts cards for 2+ years like this without problem.

i might soon get a 9700 in my possesion. i am not familiar with ATI cards as i have been with nvidia for a while. can ATI cards withstand the high bus speeds? is the 9700 a reliable card in my application?

 

[ctk1981]

Some can get it to work, but I think the general consensus is ATi based cards do not like an out of spec AGP. But like I said, there are people out there running it out of spec.

 

[kylebisme]

you would have to be really lucky to get a 9700 that took an 87mhz agpp bus. mine doesnt even like 71mhz.

 

[illusionm8]

so 133fsb with 2/3 is out of the question with this card?

133fsb is pretty common.. so im assuming the limitation here is my motherboard's agp multiplier. with all this DDR 333, 400fsb, etc im guessing there are a wide selection of agp mutlipliers so you can get this card to work?

 

[oldfart]

9700 does not like out of spec AGP. It will tolerate a little, but I highly doubt it will work @ 89 MHz.

 

[dunkster]

Until you can upgrade to a motherboard capable of locking pci and agp bus speeds as the fsb is increased, I'd choose an NVidia vid card.

My only personal comparison point of experience was with an Abit KR7ARAID board. With a Visiontek GTS32 vid card, the system was game-stable with an fsb of 147MHz (73MHz AGP bus). Upgrading to an ATI 8500LE64, the highest game-stable fsb I could run was 138MHz (69MHz AGP bus).

I've read other posts indicating ATI vid cards aren't very tolerant of non-spec AGP bus speeds.

Hope this helps!

 

[rbV5]

I ran my AIW 9700 @ 76 MHz AGP (190 FSB /5 38 * 2 =76 MHz) stable with my IWILL XP 333R before I went with my NFORCE2 board, so they will run somewhat out of spec.

 

[Noid]

Mine ran 94 mhz in my KX7-333 using 4x mode.
(no divider ,,,, @ 378 DDR)
No sweat. My NB on my MB gave out before the 9700 did.

I think the 'ney' sayer's had other issues than the vid card IMO.