The XFX GeForce 6200 AGP was the version I had as a kid. Played crysis all the way through from start to finish on that thing with an Athlon XP 3200+. I cant say it was a good experience but it was certainly an experience.
Great video, thanks. RIP old GPU, you will missed. 😉 I remember when first PCI appeared, it was a huge leap over the old ISA and VLB slots, especially when hardware 3D acceleration first appeared. The advantages of AGP over PCI become more noticeable when you have other PCI cards in the system, such as a sound card, SCSI, modem etc. The theoretical 133Mb/Sec bandwidth is shared between all the PCI cards in the system.
True, I knew about the shared 133Mb/s between all PCIs but I forgot to mention so thanks for that. In this system I used only the 6200PCI without any other PCI device so all bandwidth was exclusive to the card, but one can imagine that the performance will further drop when used with other devices.
@@yosuhara Yes, the first thing I always make sure. You can see Quake3 hitting ~300 fps and various intermediate values as the resolution increases, and I think there are other tests that also break the barrier. (unreal tournament 1999) Indeed in nglide some games are very suspicious as they hit 60fps and stay there. It's an odd behavior that maybe deserves some investigation.
Even the nglide games flinch a bit over 60, I've seen a 61... That 60fps can be very deceiving. If you see a place where the game hits 60fps and stays there, please let me know.
WoW what a job! 😮 these mothers are a treasure!! 🤤 I use the 939Dual-SATA2 and the 4CoreDual-SATA2 for similar comparisons, I recently got the GT610 PCI from Zotac but I have not yet found other cards to compare it with 😢
It's a miracle that only one 3850 broke and that it wasn't the agp one. 6200 can be easily found anywhere. I guess that as long as they are just plugged into the motherboard slots without any external power it's all good.
They still sold PCI video cards that late because a lot of OEMs still only gave you a couple of PCI slots on their lower end machines. So the only way to upgrade was a PCI graphics card.
Zotac not only made a 6200 on PCI, but also a GT 610, which is just ridiculous. And good to see the acknowledgement of how the AGP port is connected. Indeed often there is just some freakish bridge chip. Or the other way around and the PCIe only runs x4 with a bridge chip through the AGP. ASRock did some weird mutant board back then. Combining DDR & DDR2 or DDR2 & DDR3 was somewhat normal, but AGP + PCIe together was usually a hackjob.
Thank you for the comment. Indeed (like the weird Asrock) Zotac continued creating the PCI cards. I have the 8400. And I'm also aware of the 520 PCI and the 610 PCI from Zotac. That's why I included the 6200 in the top 5. (there may be more that I'm not aware of). Still from this clip it's already obvious that the 6200PCI was to much for the PCI slot and by going further with them we would only get a bigger drop in performance. AsRock had some versatile engineers they built the ultimate freak motherboards of the mid 2000s. I plan on creating some episodes looking at several motherboards that have both the PCI-ex and AGP as I have some more of them from other manufacturers: Gigabyte, Asus, Ecs and MSI if there's interest in this topic.
Ive seen on another channel where they test modern pci-e gpu on a pci slot with an adapter and it takes surprisingly a lot to saturate it. Adapters are not even expensive around $20 on AliExpress,maybe an idea for the next video testing 3850 with this adapter 😅 Ps Sorry for the edits I can't express properly what im getting at
Awesome job for an awesome video, this is quality, very detailed content. Just in case how do u manage run agp and pcie at the same time? There’s an option in every game to set the default gpu? Or even u need to change the display cable to the gpu u are trying to bench? And my main question is, do you have tested on the 4coredual-sata2? Because that mobo is a beast for this purposes.
Thank you! I plugged them all in, fortunately the 6200 worked just like that. Unfortunately the 3850 didn't and the symptoms started by having a very high core temperature on the AGP card. I guess that you are safe as long as you use a card that only draws power from the motherboard. The 7900GS also worked without any issues so my hypothesis that you don't need to have additional power connectors may not be fully correct but like I said I lost a PCIex 3850 and I wasn't willing to loose any more. If you want to build something similar just stick to running one card at a time or only use cards that draw power from the motherboard. About which GPU I use, you can set it in the BIOS which one you want to act as primary and plug the monitor cable into that one :) at least that's how I did it. I think that both the AliveDual and the 4coredual ar advertised as being able to run multiple cards with one acting as primary and the second one being there just for the extra connectors for extra monitors. I guess that if I would have set the AGP as primary I could still send video signal to a second monitor using the PCIex.
And now for your main question. I was for a long time under the same impression that the 4coredual motherboard is a beast. It's actually the CPUs that it supports that are beastly :). The motherboard is there for the ride...and to provide the AGP port. Joking aside, the 4coredual should be the first goto motherboard because it supports the latest core2quad meaning there will be no CPU bottleneck for any AGP graphics card. On the other side the 4coredual is not a gifted as the AliveDual because it's PCIex connector is not a fully working 16x one but rather something put together by Asrock engineers which is still great as well but not a full PCIex 16x, that is why I haven't used that one for this clip. I do hope to produce a clip with that motherboard soon as I've got some several new 6200 one that has as low as 16Mb ram the rest being turbocache.
@@retrodrive-thru47 thanks for the answer mate, tbh I was trying to run a pci-e SSD Ocz revodrive 350 series paired with hd 3850 agp but no success, (I have the 4coredual-sata2 r2.0 with the modded bios) I don’t know if we can run audio pci-e or sata controllers also. Some ppl on voggons forums claims that’s possible (maybe with the older revodrives ssd’s) if you have some pci-e audio or controllers can you confirm that? Or maybe is only for gpus but it doesn’t have much sense. From my knowledge the pci-e peripheral must be 2.0 version at max and 1.0 for preference, modern nvmes drives with adapter won’t boot or any uefi compatible device.
@@manuelmunoz4054 Wow this is as advanced as it gets. Personally I prefer a raid0 made of as many WD velociraptors as possible. Obviously they will never touch the retrodrive's latency/speed but they will get good enough. I plan to explore that topic soon. I was also curious if the PCI-ex in the 4coredual can be multi purpose. But as far as I know it's not native to that kind of chipset so it's like a workaround. I've read some posts were people were complaining about newer graphics cards not running on that motherboard because of it's limitations.
22:18 Now we know :) 40:24 Hey you need to try it You went great lengths to test AGP and PCE, pretty much AGP had some life in it maybe for even next generation imagine 8800gt on AGP
AGP did have some life left. I would even argue that the AGP could be prolonged even further than the 8000 series (9000 series was just an upgraded 8000 anyway). Looking at the electrical contacts: AGP had 66 on a side (132 total) and PCIex x16 had 82 on a side (164 total) from an electrical point of view I think that even running an AGP like a PCIex x8 would have been enough for a while (and there's also the AGP Pro that had more connectors), but multiple GPU solution were pushed to the marked and the AGP port couldn't be duplicated on a motherboard to handle those. Although it was a bit premature I think it was it's time to go :))
@@retrodrive-thru47 Yeoh they needed to push new motherboards. i remember my AGP GF 7600 GS was at same level as friends 7600 GS . Even if he had some powerful CPU at time Athlon 64 3600 and i was on Athlon XP 3200+ Barton core
The results reflect pretty well the limits of the card. an RTS from the same year runs well enough to be playable while open-world games form the years before don't do so well. It being an nvidia card, CS might run better in OpenGL. UT99 should do similar, but there are also more recent renderers, both an updated OpenGL and a D3D9 and D3D10 renderer are available, and obviously nGlide. If Afterburner doesn't work (for the OSD), there is always good old Fraps. That will give at least a decent fps counter, even if the recording feature is bad.
I feel the same way about the game types. The new clip I'm currently producing uses a Cyrix 6x86 150+ (1996) and the racing games and shooters (from 1997) absolutely refuse to have decent framerates, but Age of Empires and Total Annihilation run great. I have to admit that OpenGL didn't cross my mind during these tests, it would have been a great addition for the 6200 PCI sidequest. I have only limited knowledge about new renderers or how to mod a game with a new renderer. By accident I found a D3D9 renderer for Red Alert 2( a game I play from time to time) that makes it compatible with my new hardware. I guess I'll have to look into that but I'm not sure exactly where. As for the frames counter I found Afterburner to take about 2-5% of performance with minimal options enabled and about 5-10% when more information is displayed(for a 2.4Ghz P4), Fraps only takes 1-2% and works almost universally. But there are exceptions, in Glide sometimes Fraps refuses to start.
I had an AGP 3850 I'm really sad I lost, Had a nice overclock on the GPU and my CPU. However I left the menu/login of Diablo III going which at the time had a bug over-utilized/maxed out your system, Went upstairs for a few minutes Lost my Power supply which fried the GPU and Motherboard. I recently got my friends old AGP 4670 but have yet to play around with it.
Yes, I can feel the pain. I never knew that about Diablo III. I'm sorry to hear about the 3850 AGP and motherboard. They are quite rare and expensive nowadays. I know it's not the same thing but the PCI-E has exactly the same performance at a way cheaper price. I was very lucky and relieved when I pulled out the 3850 AGP of this system and it was ok.
same like counter strike also goes way too slow for your system, did you test it in opengl, direc3d or software too? ;-) unreal also supports software, direct3d and opengl modes, in half life you have enabled vsync as i see 60 fps lock
I'm also very surprised about counter strike. I think it may have been open gl (but by the looks of it it may just as well be software mode :)). I am aware that unreal supports all modes, it's a good benchmark for some future versus I plan to do( a voodoo versus some geforce equivalent). If I'm not mistaken unreal tournament 99 also supports all these modes. Half life is problematic with vsync I never managed to get it over 71, let alone 100 as some people do(they say that over 100 it breaks the physics of the game) , I'm using a very old version.
@@dim0n1 I've actually tried that (a lot of times and with different commands also, I had console enabled) for my current video and it's frustrating that it doesn't work. If possible you'll have to bear with me another video of HalfLife frame caps as it looks I may need to investigate this issue with my current HL installer (maybe I need a different one). But at least in my upcoming video I solved the issue of the messed up fonts in NFS Porsche....Solving one thing at a time..
@@retrodrive-thru47not a problem, maybe i even find somewhere cs configs also ;-) btw did a quick look and max fps was 72 in early versions... for single player, for multiplayer, nobody cares, there is no "AI", which an brake ;-)
Since I'm into the retro stuff, 90%of the time I'm dealing with ATA hard-drives. So it makes more sense for me to see a Sata hard-drive like a Serial ATA .. So far the channel has shown rather modern systems that I thought would appeal the viewers but my parts go way back to 286s and most of them are around the Pentium 2 pentium 3 period.
The original clip did stop there, I never planned on looking into the HD3850 or 7900GS. But since the original clip needed to be re-rendered I decided to add some additional content so the people that watch the clip again don't feel cheated. And since the 6200PCI showed its limitations being at least 10% slower because of the PCI bus I wanted to investigate if the same thing applies to the last AGP cards and their PCI-ex counterparts and the conclusion was obvious, unlike the PCI, the AGP was not saturated and no performance was lost there.
While I think that motherboard is great at comparing PCIe and AGP video cards, it's not a good platform for PCI. PCI video cards will likely be bottlenecked at 32-bit @ 33MHz. You really should be testing PCI video cards in a PCI-X slot, to see their true potential.
Wow, that's really something I haven't considered. I can do this because I have a xeon motherboard with pci-x. It also has pci so I can test the difference. Do you think that the card will behave different? After all the card itself is made for 32bit @33mhz so putting it into a faster slot may not yield better results...but it's a fun test to do. The only constraint I had for this project regarding the PCIs was that no other pci device to be connected so they don't share the limited bandwidth of the southbridge.
A lot of the more recent PCI video cards are actually 32-bit @ 66MHz. If the card has two notches, they can be used in both 5v and 3.3v PCI slots. This is usually indicative of supporting PCI-X.
The XFX GeForce 6200 AGP was the version I had as a kid. Played crysis all the way through from start to finish on that thing with an Athlon XP 3200+. I cant say it was a good experience but it was certainly an experience.
wow such a comprehensive work. Appreciated.
Thank you!
Great video, thanks. RIP old GPU, you will missed. 😉 I remember when first PCI appeared, it was a huge leap over the old ISA and VLB slots, especially when hardware 3D acceleration first appeared. The advantages of AGP over PCI become more noticeable when you have other PCI cards in the system, such as a sound card, SCSI, modem etc. The theoretical 133Mb/Sec bandwidth is shared between all the PCI cards in the system.
True, I knew about the shared 133Mb/s between all PCIs but I forgot to mention so thanks for that. In this system I used only the 6200PCI without any other PCI device so all bandwidth was exclusive to the card, but one can imagine that the performance will further drop when used with other devices.
you will be a great content creator in time. keep up the good work. more old builds to come
I appreciate that! I have a pentium pro 180mhz right now on the bench table so retro is here to stay :))
Very extensive and comprehensive tests! Well done, thank you.
Thank you, since the 6200pci was bottleneked, I plan to revisit the matter in while, maybe with a Fx5200agp VS a Fx5200pci.
@@retrodrive-thru47 Just to be on safe side, you didn't mentioned Vsync anywhere, I suppose it was turned off for all the tests? :)
@@yosuhara Yes, the first thing I always make sure. You can see Quake3 hitting ~300 fps and various intermediate values as the resolution increases, and I think there are other tests that also break the barrier. (unreal tournament 1999) Indeed in nglide some games are very suspicious as they hit 60fps and stay there. It's an odd behavior that maybe deserves some investigation.
Even the nglide games flinch a bit over 60, I've seen a 61... That 60fps can be very deceiving. If you see a place where the game hits 60fps and stays there, please let me know.
@@retrodrive-thru47 yes, exactly those nglide tests caught my attention. Thanks for the answer! 👍
WoW what a job! 😮 these mothers are a treasure!! 🤤 I use the 939Dual-SATA2 and the 4CoreDual-SATA2 for similar comparisons, I recently got the GT610 PCI from Zotac but I have not yet found other cards to compare it with 😢
Thank you, I am planning a lot more comparisons between agp and pci ex cards in the future. It's hard to compare the Gt610 with anything else.
A miracle, that all of them were detected, usually, it's only one.
It's a miracle that only one 3850 broke and that it wasn't the agp one. 6200 can be easily found anywhere. I guess that as long as they are just plugged into the motherboard slots without any external power it's all good.
@@retrodrive-thru47
One of my then friends tossed the AGP version of 3850...
Darn,i was so angry at him!!!
@@DuneRunnerEnterprises The PCIex version is just as good and so much cheaper... There's always that alternative.
some of the best hardware you have there for testing agp
Thank you, I hope to use it further in the future and compare it to the Asrock 4coredual.
Very nice video, answering a question I've always had in my head about how AGP compared with PCIE.
I'm glad it was helpful. I do plan to look at other Agp vs PCI-ex pairs in the future.
They still sold PCI video cards that late because a lot of OEMs still only gave you a couple of PCI slots on their lower end machines. So the only way to upgrade was a PCI graphics card.
I never knew that, that explains why there is a 610 and 710 nvidia pci.
Yet another great video. Funny how you fried that graphics card :)
Well, sometimes it happens I guess. I should have stopped when I noticed the AGP was getting really hot but I hoped to capture as it happened.
Finally some good content on TH-cam
Thank you, I hope there's more to come.
Zotac not only made a 6200 on PCI, but also a GT 610, which is just ridiculous.
And good to see the acknowledgement of how the AGP port is connected. Indeed often there is just some freakish bridge chip. Or the other way around and the PCIe only runs x4 with a bridge chip through the AGP.
ASRock did some weird mutant board back then. Combining DDR & DDR2 or DDR2 & DDR3 was somewhat normal, but AGP + PCIe together was usually a hackjob.
Thank you for the comment. Indeed (like the weird Asrock) Zotac continued creating the PCI cards. I have the 8400. And I'm also aware of the 520 PCI and the 610 PCI from Zotac. That's why I included the 6200 in the top 5. (there may be more that I'm not aware of). Still from this clip it's already obvious that the 6200PCI was to much for the PCI slot and by going further with them we would only get a bigger drop in performance. AsRock had some versatile engineers they built the ultimate freak motherboards of the mid 2000s. I plan on creating some episodes looking at several motherboards that have both the PCI-ex and AGP as I have some more of them from other manufacturers: Gigabyte, Asus, Ecs and MSI if there's interest in this topic.
@@retrodrive-thru47 9500 gt pci is the fastest in some benchmarks
Ive seen on another channel where they test modern pci-e gpu on a pci slot with an adapter and it takes surprisingly a lot to saturate it.
Adapters are not even expensive around $20 on AliExpress,maybe an idea for the next video testing 3850 with this adapter 😅
Ps Sorry for the edits I can't express properly what im getting at
Awesome job for an awesome video, this is quality, very detailed content. Just in case how do u manage run agp and pcie at the same time? There’s an option in every game to set the default gpu? Or even u need to change the display cable to the gpu u are trying to bench? And my main question is, do you have tested on the 4coredual-sata2? Because that mobo is a beast for this purposes.
Thank you! I plugged them all in, fortunately the 6200 worked just like that. Unfortunately the 3850 didn't and the symptoms started by having a very high core temperature on the AGP card. I guess that you are safe as long as you use a card that only draws power from the motherboard. The 7900GS also worked without any issues so my hypothesis that you don't need to have additional power connectors may not be fully correct but like I said I lost a PCIex 3850 and I wasn't willing to loose any more. If you want to build something similar just stick to running one card at a time or only use cards that draw power from the motherboard. About which GPU I use, you can set it in the BIOS which one you want to act as primary and plug the monitor cable into that one :) at least that's how I did it. I think that both the AliveDual and the 4coredual ar advertised as being able to run multiple cards with one acting as primary and the second one being there just for the extra connectors for extra monitors. I guess that if I would have set the AGP as primary I could still send video signal to a second monitor using the PCIex.
And now for your main question. I was for a long time under the same impression that the 4coredual motherboard is a beast. It's actually the CPUs that it supports that are beastly :). The motherboard is there for the ride...and to provide the AGP port. Joking aside, the 4coredual should be the first goto motherboard because it supports the latest core2quad meaning there will be no CPU bottleneck for any AGP graphics card. On the other side the 4coredual is not a gifted as the AliveDual because it's PCIex connector is not a fully working 16x one but rather something put together by Asrock engineers which is still great as well but not a full PCIex 16x, that is why I haven't used that one for this clip. I do hope to produce a clip with that motherboard soon as I've got some several new 6200 one that has as low as 16Mb ram the rest being turbocache.
@@retrodrive-thru47 thanks for the answer mate, tbh I was trying to run a pci-e SSD Ocz revodrive 350 series paired with hd 3850 agp but no success, (I have the 4coredual-sata2 r2.0 with the modded bios) I don’t know if we can run audio pci-e or sata controllers also. Some ppl on voggons forums claims that’s possible (maybe with the older revodrives ssd’s) if you have some pci-e audio or controllers can you confirm that? Or maybe is only for gpus but it doesn’t have much sense. From my knowledge the pci-e peripheral must be 2.0 version at max and 1.0 for preference, modern nvmes drives with adapter won’t boot or any uefi compatible device.
@@manuelmunoz4054 Wow this is as advanced as it gets. Personally I prefer a raid0 made of as many WD velociraptors as possible. Obviously they will never touch the retrodrive's latency/speed but they will get good enough. I plan to explore that topic soon. I was also curious if the PCI-ex in the 4coredual can be multi purpose. But as far as I know it's not native to that kind of chipset so it's like a workaround. I've read some posts were people were complaining about newer graphics cards not running on that motherboard because of it's limitations.
22:18
Now we know :)
40:24
Hey you need to try it
You went great lengths to test AGP and PCE, pretty much AGP had some life in it maybe for even next generation imagine 8800gt on AGP
AGP did have some life left. I would even argue that the AGP could be prolonged even further than the 8000 series (9000 series was just an upgraded 8000 anyway). Looking at the electrical contacts: AGP had 66 on a side (132 total) and PCIex x16 had 82 on a side (164 total) from an electrical point of view I think that even running an AGP like a PCIex x8 would have been enough for a while (and there's also the AGP Pro that had more connectors), but multiple GPU solution were pushed to the marked and the AGP port couldn't be duplicated on a motherboard to handle those. Although it was a bit premature I think it was it's time to go :))
@@retrodrive-thru47
Yeoh they needed to push new motherboards. i remember my AGP GF 7600 GS was at same level as friends 7600 GS .
Even if he had some powerful CPU at time Athlon 64 3600 and i was on Athlon XP 3200+ Barton core
The results reflect pretty well the limits of the card. an RTS from the same year runs well enough to be playable while open-world games form the years before don't do so well.
It being an nvidia card, CS might run better in OpenGL. UT99 should do similar, but there are also more recent renderers, both an updated OpenGL and a D3D9 and D3D10 renderer are available, and obviously nGlide.
If Afterburner doesn't work (for the OSD), there is always good old Fraps. That will give at least a decent fps counter, even if the recording feature is bad.
I feel the same way about the game types. The new clip I'm currently producing uses a Cyrix 6x86 150+ (1996) and the racing games and shooters (from 1997) absolutely refuse to have decent framerates, but Age of Empires and Total Annihilation run great. I have to admit that OpenGL didn't cross my mind during these tests, it would have been a great addition for the 6200 PCI sidequest. I have only limited knowledge about new renderers or how to mod a game with a new renderer. By accident I found a D3D9 renderer for Red Alert 2( a game I play from time to time) that makes it compatible with my new hardware. I guess I'll have to look into that but I'm not sure exactly where. As for the frames counter I found Afterburner to take about 2-5% of performance with minimal options enabled and about 5-10% when more information is displayed(for a 2.4Ghz P4), Fraps only takes 1-2% and works almost universally. But there are exceptions, in Glide sometimes Fraps refuses to start.
@@retrodrive-thru47 and when in doubt, the original rivatuner is available. no osd, but at least some monitoring.
I had an AGP 3850 I'm really sad I lost, Had a nice overclock on the GPU and my CPU. However I left the menu/login of Diablo III going which at the time had a bug over-utilized/maxed out your system, Went upstairs for a few minutes Lost my Power supply which fried the GPU and Motherboard. I recently got my friends old AGP 4670 but have yet to play around with it.
Yes, I can feel the pain. I never knew that about Diablo III. I'm sorry to hear about the 3850 AGP and motherboard. They are quite rare and expensive nowadays. I know it's not the same thing but the PCI-E has exactly the same performance at a way cheaper price. I was very lucky and relieved when I pulled out the 3850 AGP of this system and it was ok.
same like counter strike also goes way too slow for your system, did you test it in opengl, direc3d or software too? ;-) unreal also supports software, direct3d and opengl modes, in half life you have enabled vsync as i see 60 fps lock
I'm also very surprised about counter strike. I think it may have been open gl (but by the looks of it it may just as well be software mode :)). I am aware that unreal supports all modes, it's a good benchmark for some future versus I plan to do( a voodoo versus some geforce equivalent). If I'm not mistaken unreal tournament 99 also supports all these modes. Half life is problematic with vsync I never managed to get it over 71, let alone 100 as some people do(they say that over 100 it breaks the physics of the game) , I'm using a very old version.
About max fps in hl & cs (modified Quake 1 engine), you need to put in console com_maxfps and number fps, I had com_maxfps 125 as I remember :)
@@dim0n1 I've actually tried that (a lot of times and with different commands also, I had console enabled) for my current video and it's frustrating that it doesn't work. If possible you'll have to bear with me another video of HalfLife frame caps as it looks I may need to investigate this issue with my current HL installer (maybe I need a different one). But at least in my upcoming video I solved the issue of the messed up fonts in NFS Porsche....Solving one thing at a time..
@@retrodrive-thru47not a problem, maybe i even find somewhere cs configs also ;-) btw did a quick look and max fps was 72 in early versions... for single player, for multiplayer, nobody cares, there is no "AI", which an brake ;-)
... dont serm too much unplayable crysis... its exactly how we play back in 2007
Ha ha, I guess you are right!
Been awhile since I've heard someone call sata serial ata
Since I'm into the retro stuff, 90%of the time I'm dealing with ATA hard-drives. So it makes more sense for me to see a Sata hard-drive like a Serial ATA .. So far the channel has shown rather modern systems that I thought would appeal the viewers but my parts go way back to 286s and most of them are around the Pentium 2 pentium 3 period.
It might not have a big impact - but dualchannel ram would be great for low end cards
You are right. I will soon make a remaster of it with an Intel motherboard, and the fx5200 equivalent and I will keep dual channel in mind.
@@retrodrive-thru47 you did for the 7900g ;)
@@drunkenn00b I did?
A rare hybrid mobo with two types of gpu slots😬
Indeed, I do have more of them for sk 775, 754, 939 and 478 but most of them have a "fake" AGP connected to a PCI.
"64bit" and there that vid should end.
The original clip did stop there, I never planned on looking into the HD3850 or 7900GS. But since the original clip needed to be re-rendered I decided to add some additional content so the people that watch the clip again don't feel cheated. And since the 6200PCI showed its limitations being at least 10% slower because of the PCI bus I wanted to investigate if the same thing applies to the last AGP cards and their PCI-ex counterparts and the conclusion was obvious, unlike the PCI, the AGP was not saturated and no performance was lost there.
While I think that motherboard is great at comparing PCIe and AGP video cards, it's not a good platform for PCI. PCI video cards will likely be bottlenecked at 32-bit @ 33MHz. You really should be testing PCI video cards in a PCI-X slot, to see their true potential.
Wow, that's really something I haven't considered. I can do this because I have a xeon motherboard with pci-x. It also has pci so I can test the difference. Do you think that the card will behave different? After all the card itself is made for 32bit @33mhz so putting it into a faster slot may not yield better results...but it's a fun test to do. The only constraint I had for this project regarding the PCIs was that no other pci device to be connected so they don't share the limited bandwidth of the southbridge.
A lot of the more recent PCI video cards are actually 32-bit @ 66MHz. If the card has two notches, they can be used in both 5v and 3.3v PCI slots. This is usually indicative of supporting PCI-X.
That ram is plugged in the wrong way so it uses only single channel