Ok I went and got the new ATI 9600XT It's a whole lot faster than the other
card I had, but..
This Asus board / Video card are both listed as 8X AGP.. Tried everything I
can think of but cant' get the ATI card to set at 8X. It always drops back
to 4X.
I see in the bios a voltage setting for the AGP and there doesn't seem to be
one for 0.8. This is the voltage for 8X, yes?
This is set for Auto.
Bios is 1004.
Installed the latest SIS drivers from Asus.
Catalyst 3.8 drivers for the ATI card.
Any other crazy people out there with ideas. Experience..
jb..
I did a check in Google and for another motherboard with an SIS chipset
there was this suggestion:
"have same problems with my radeon 9700 pro only way i can get
8x agp on is to install the sis 1.13 agp driver all others
throw it back to 4x."
So, all I could suggest is trying that particular version.
There have been cases where the Asus BIOS fiddles with things on its
own. If for example, there is a known conflict case with a chipset,
the BIOS might reduce the max setting allowed. Since your video card
is so new, that isn't likely to be the case.
I take it you are using the "SmartGART" tab to set the AGP rate ?
SmartGART can override whatever the BIOS thinks, but if the SIS driver
only offers 4X, maybe it cannot override that.
BTW: Don't expect a big increase in performance with AGP 8X. I think
that transfer rate is used for texture transfer and I'm not sure it
is used for ordinary transactions. Any card with large amounts of
texture memory hardly ever has to use the AGP interface to get more
textures. A lot of games can store a whole level inside the AGP card
before game play commences. If the card had a small memory, you would
see more of a difference.
From one of the AGP documents, I see this. Basically the AD signals
go at 8X, but the ordinary transaction control signals work at
66MHz. This means the opportunities to use 8X transfer are rare.
When a game comes along with 1GB textures per level, then the AGP
transfer rate will make a difference.
AD AGP3.0 Signaling 533MT/s/Source Synch
FRAME, TRDY, IRDY, AGP3.0 Signaling 66MHz/Common Clock
STOP, GNT, DEVSEL,
PERR, SERR, REQ,
IDSEL, RBF, WBF
HTH,
Paul
