Running an 8X on a 4X?

[MarkFahey]

I see alot of peeps are running 8X 9700 Pro's on 4X Mobo's. What (if any) is the drawback and loss of performance in doing this? I would assume running an 8X can in an 8X AGP slot would be better? No?

Thanks

Mark

 

[SafeZone]

I don't believe the 8x vid cards are saturating the extra bandwidth of the 8x agp bus...

so I don't believe you will any noticeable performance difference...

My guess is 8x support in the 9700 pro is for the future when higher res graphics increase the amount of data flow through the agp bus and therefore 8x will be necessary

its the same as when agp 4x came out, just about all the cards on the market couldn't even saturate 2x, and hence 4x only became usefull later on when the software and video cards could actually use the extra bandwidth

 

[Viper96720]

Right now a few frames sometimes and no difference at others.

 

[bsr]

Well it is better to run it in a 8x slot (would give much better bandwidth), I never acually did any testing between 4x and 8x , but I suppose that you would loss alittle frame rate running in a 4x slot. Probly nothing severe, but id consider a board with 8x slot if i were to buy radeon 9700 (or any 8x for that matter).

 

[jiffylube1024]

the difference is tiny - for a Radeon 9700 it's under 5%, more like 1-2% I believe.

 

[Keysplayr]

From what I have read in many AGP 8x MoBo reviews, current applications and games do not even utilize the full 4x AGP bus yet. There is always the possibility for example, that some high end software like CAD or realtime 3d rendering programs may call for such bandwidth. But I haven't read anything like that for the average gamer and PC user. It's good to have an AGP 8x card though. That means that you can upgrade your 4x MoBo to an 8x MoBo later on and still have an up to date Vid card. So to answer your question to the best of my ability, no, you will not lose performance with a 4x MoBo and 8x vid card.

Keys

 

[MarkFahey]

Thanks for all the replies Guys!


Mark