Kev said:
Hi, my motherboard has an empty PCI slot next to the AGP slot. I heard
somewhere that the PCI slot to the AGP can only be used if the AGP slot
isn't in use, is that correct?
No.
However, the PCI slot adjacent to the AGP slot shares IRQs with AGP (the
AGP slot is actually an 'extension' of that PCI slot) and that can create
problems with certain cards, most notably sound cards (especially if they
has a 'DOS compatibility' mode which emulates ISA use, which is NOT
'sharable' like PCI IRQs are).
The same situation occurs with PCI slots past 4 as they are 'expansion'
slots from the 4'th and can have problems if incompatible PCI cards are put
in them; again, most notably, sound cards.
It comes from the nature of the PCU bus, which is 4 slots. More than that
and they are, by definition, 'expansions' from the 4 primary slots. And AGP
is a PCI slot 'plus' the AGP memory access. In fact, until there is any AGP
memory used, an AGP display card is equivalaent to a PCI display card.