I still don't understand why this channel has so fewer subs. The information, footage, edition and narrative are underrated. I've been watching these videos for more than a year and yet I still see the subs count grow quite slowly. Keep up the good work! Someday, UA-cam's algorithm will do some justice.
During the lockdown I finally built myself a very fast AGP WindowsXP system and I'm loving it. Specs of my "Ultimate AGP PC": Pentium Dual Core E5800, 2x1GB Kingston DDR-400 cl3, Asrock 775i65G Rev.2.03, Sapphire Radeon HD3850 512MB GDDR3 AGP, SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum, Transcend 32GB SSD, WD Velociraptor 250GB, Corsair CX430, Chieftec Dragon.
sweet setup! I have an AMD FX60 on an MSI K8-Neo2 with Corsair Pro blinkenlights RAM and I use a WD Raptor 10k 36Gb drive, the GPU changes with what I want to do with it but it's most often either a Ti-4600, 6800Ultra, ATi 1950pro or a HD3850 AGP
Oh, that's a rare find! the pentium E5800 is the last LGA 775 CPU so it doesn't work with most older AGP 775 boards. Nice build :). My windows XP PC is an HP Worstation xw4400 and it's pretty overkill for XP, especially with the quad core Xeon CPU I put in it xD. Knowing that it was 2500 bucks In 2006 is mind blowing tho.
10:04 I still have one of my 939Dual-SATA2, but it just stopped booting one day so I bought another one... then that one did the same thing eventually. I remember upgrading from a GeForce 6200 to a GeForce 8800GT back in the day as a result of that motherboard... what an upgrade!
@@MartinGP_3dfxlegacy You say Asrock is crap, but the funny thing is some of the most desirable retro motherboards to get are old Asrock boards. Their designed might not have captured the attention compared to DFI's fluro UV. But they had very solid designed and are also some of the best for early 2000's XP era retro machines. Especially those rare native 8x AGP & 16X PCIe combo boards.
I had a 939Dual-Sata2. It was great. I had an Athlon 64 3200+ on it, afterwards an Opteron 165. Also my 6600GT AGP, upgraded to 7900GS PCI-e. All on the same board!
Excelent video. Broadly thorough and concise! Precisely what my curiosity wanted to find. Nice work and thank you Pixel Pipes. Pack that raster pipe with some hella dank thermal paste and smoke it! You’ve earned it
Just purchased a prebuilt and noticed the agp setting in the bios, glad I found this video as it explained it nicely and was thinking why would I even need this setting on a 8g video card.
Very nice overview of the tried-and-true AGP bus. I have been tinkering with many motherboards with that slot over the years, very recently putting together a machine with a MSI 694D Pro...implementation of the early 4x slots didn't always pan out like they were supposed to. I'm finding that the early VIA chipsets supporting SMP (this is a dual PIII motherboard) are a great migraine trigger! They were notoriously bad for not running their 4x AGP at 4x. As time goes on, it is also getting harder to find archived forums that detailed the struggles of those that toiled on these machines in that era. Anyways, I've always appreciated your well written scripts loaded with such good information. (Also, looks like you might have a nice 5950 Ultra on the shelf!)
The last AGP card I owned was the Radeon x800 Pro. It was available in both AGP 8 and PCIe. I was upgrading from an AGP 4 Ti4200. I still own both cards.
Same I had a Saphie version and it was a little beast. Had it on a Socket A machine (which was a bit overkill but it helped ease the CPU’s job). Good times playing Orange Box games and other mid to late 00’s titles.
The fact that is was exclusive to graphics is kinda special, but actually, when you think about it, most of the time, the first PCIe slot on modern motherboards is 99 % of the time only used for a GPU. ^^
AGP was good but it wasn't all roses all the time. I remember having a fair amount of issues when AGP 4x was released with certain video cards & certain chipsets. There were times when you had to go back to AGP 2x and/or disable fast writes in order to keep things stable. PCI-E IMO is probably the best interface to come along since the original ISA slots!
@@PixelPipes yeah! Only Intel had the real circuit plans to produce this technology while Via,Ali,SIS did reverse engineering to try do something similar.. speed and stability weren't they highlights but you could at least try with a video card/chipset combination drivers to get the best results
My last AGP Graphic card was Asus GeForce 6600 256 mb, after that I had to say goodbye to my Socket A platform and move on to AM2 with PCI-E. P.S. As for my first AGP Graphic card, it was Asus AGP V7700Ti/32M (GeForce 2 Ti) and it was great for it's time. P.S. This is quite a nostalgic UA-cam channel you have here.
My last AGP card was a PNY XLR8 6800GS. By using Riva Tuner I was able to unlock the pixel and vertex pipelines from 12/5 to 16/6 same as the 6800GT. Fun times back then!
ooooooh boy. Painful story that agp, with a bit of a happy ending. When we got our first modern PC(for the time), AGP was almost out the door. My 6800GT barely lasted a year. Nvidia's 7xxx series rolled out and it was PCI express only. I could not upgrade my PC. Even my mobos socket was a dead end as there were no dual core CPUs for it. Fortunately Ati released AGP versions of the HD3650 and HD3850. I got the 3850 and it gave my system some more life. I could play mass effect when the PC port hit store shelves and it liven up the frame rate on Oblivion and F.E.A.R
AGP was dominant in the early to mid 2000’s and I wouldn’t have bought a motherboard without it back then. It allowed GPU’s to escape the backwards compatibility shackles of past times and move forward with the leaps and bounds graphics were makings it was a great thing back then. I had PCI-X on my Tyan motherboard for SCSI U320 adapter but alas no GPU’s used the PCI-X interface at least that I know of. Another great video.
This is probably unexpected, but: thank you. A few years ago some random guy tried to tell me I was lying when I said I'd ogled enthusiast-level systems with PCI-X back in the early 00s. He kept saying they were only ever used in servers and workstations and _never ever_ appeared on even the highest-end home setups. Even though I knew what I remembered, it's still an interaction that's stuck with me. Even after I clarified it was the kind of "workstation at home" user that buys a Threadripper today or a Xeon in the '10s. So, yeah. Thanks for validating that memory!
I am really enjoying just letting these quality videos play on and on as I do work. PixelPipes is one of the most criminally underratted retro PC tech channels on youtube.
That's driver's in general regardless if it was a PCI, AGP, and PCIe cards, chipset driver's or what have you. Badly written driver's will cause a BSOD.
On mainstream desktop PCs, there's only one active 16-lane PCIe slot. Two physical 16 lanes PCIe slots can divide into two active 8-lane. The situation remained almost status quo.
I had a 939Dual-Sata2. It was great. I had an Athlon 64 3200+ on it, afterwards an Opteron 165. Also my 6600GT AGP, upgraded to 7900GS PCI-e. All on the same board!
I remember my friend Brad, introducing me to AGP, and 3D graphics. He would use futuremark demos, or some other demo, IDK. "Watch, as the plane flies up at you" look at the highlights!, all that jazz. That was in 1998. What I remember most, going to his house, to play a game, made by activision, Battlezone. That was on a Matrox Millenium G200.
Man had I seen this just a week sooner I would of noticed the TNT2 Ultra I picked up was keyed for 3.3v slots only and not realised my blunder until trying to install it in a 865P based board.
The other side of the "universal" coin was AGP cards that had both key slots, and would fit (but not always work) in 3.3V boards as well as 1.5V - the compatibility of some older chipsets being hit or miss
When i was using AGP 8x i used a 6800LE (modded to GT+ unlcked pixpelpipes) before stepping over to pci-express then i bought a xfx 7900 GT i remembering some of the Agp cards could still compete with their pci-express counterparts This video is usefull for those that never owned a agp port or even heard of :)
I still remember using an Intel 740 "starfighter" 8mb card. Had to hold the heatsink on a few times during intense cs1.6 matches when people went nuts with smoke grenades. Smoke made the gpu work HARD. played shogo Mad with some settings tweaks and tachyon the fringe. I was surprised that the gpu never killed itseft when the heatsink fell off. It was thermal glued on. I'm curious to see if the 740 performance would be better with a fast ddr2 system when using dma.
I had love/hate relationship with AGP. The cheap Socket 7 mobos (like Acorp) with non-Intel chipsets had various issues with that interface, often resulting in graphics artifacts in 3D games, so I had to turn off most of the advanced AGP features and downgrade it to simply a high-speed PCI, after spending countless hours in swapping drivers and flipping BIOS/Registry settings. My last AGP mobo was Abit KV8-Pro and it is where I first managed to get my GeForce 6600GT to play hardware-accelerated HD video (max 720p at that time), thankfully to the proper implementation of the last AGP specs, incl. FastWrites , that allowed direct transfer of data to the GPU. Honestly, I had a relief after upgrading to PCI-E and leaving the fragile and fragmented AGP standard for good.
There was also AMR. I think it was audio and modem riser. I am not sure when it was completely phased out but I know that I never owned a PC that has it anyhow. It is one of those odd things that was short lived.
I actually had a motherboard from DFI back in the early 2000s that had 2 AGP slots but of course only one could be used at a time. Think I just now figured out why after watching this amazing video ❤️
I've been interested in testing AGP vs PCIe but it's really difficult. The best case scenario is using the asrock 4core dual but even then you're limiting the PCIe version of the card to PCIe 1.1 at 4x lane... I feel that's an unfair comparison
@@wishusknight3009 the 939Dual with AM2 card is a good one. But good luck finding that upgrade card. Also ther is an ASRock board called AliveDual-eSATA2, a native AM2 motherboard with PCI-E 16x and AGP 8x. According to ASRock it has a solution with 2 chipsets using a ULi M1695 and an nForce 3 250 Ultra limiting the bus speed of the Phenom processors. Another problem I see is that most more powerful AGP cards use a bridge chip, so that might influence performance as well.
@@PixelPipes Get an 939Dual-sata2 and do 6800 GT native AGP vs native PCI-E, or X800 native AGP vs native PCI-E; it's the only native AGP vs native PCI-E I can think of, however. Later generations used bridge chips like mad.
@@qpwoeiruty668 Had it, used it, reviewed it in a video. It doesn't support enough CPU power. You'd be surprised how far the 16-pipe generation of cards can scale in performance.
My retro pc is rocking an Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2 Rev. 2.0 board with a C2D E8500 and a Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 AGP graphics card. It is a fun little machine.
I know it's hard man, but personally, it would be nice to see you putting out more in-depth content more often, and delving into modern hardware some as well.. in hopes of attracting more people to your channel. I greatly appreciate your work, and the effort you go to to make the content that you do, and I wish you the best! I hope your channel grows!
Thanks for the kind words! At this point I have no plans to cover modern hardware unless I have a specific retro-inspired (and graphics-related) angle for it. I wish I could put out more content than I do, but I only have so much free time.
You look like Cal Tjader my top favourite jazz vibraphone artist and I'm also a computer freak. You have a great channel and here goes the subscribe too.
So weird seeing something that was once as normal, prevalent and universally accepted as a PCIE slot, and that NO ONE had ANY ISSUES WITH... as being described as "weird" now. We grew up with AGP. It was one of the only things that mattered for a decade. There was no alternative and why would there be? In fact, it was widely accepted that this is the future- there would be an AGP16, 64, 512 and soforth. It was the best thing on a motherboard, it was the only thing that counted and it had no issues(except that it's not PCIE... now). Radeon HD 3850+Core 2 Quad = Gaming Heaven! It would be like looking back and describing the PCIE-slot as weird and kids of the future thinking- "They played via this thing!?" Goodbye, good slot! You deserved better. 😀
I will never forget my mistake: getting a Radeon HD 3850 AGP… for a Pentium 4 machine. Then got stuck with the card and had to “upgrade” to a newer system with an AGP slot. This was in 2009. Oof.
@@armorgeddon I was just a teenager and didn't research too much. I thought that I would be fine with just upgrading the GPU instead of getting a new computer with PCIe (considering the cost as well). Boy, I was wrong.
PixelPipes AGP was initially: GAP (Graphics Attach Port). A certain retailer had already trademarked GAP. Intel did work closely with ATI on defining AGP. One of the reasons ATI surged in market share in the mid 90’s was because of the integrated 3D with AGP2x support (RagePro)
Can you possibly do a more in depth look at AGP history , more specifically how it made its way onto socket 7 becoming a socket 7/AGP (NON SUPER 7) and that did not make it a super socket 7 board and how AMDs design of Super Socket 7 helped AGP gain a foot hold. why a Chipsets like SiS5598 is a generic integrated graphics controller and not AGP, though it was thought to be the first AGP chipset - I believe the SiS5592 was SiS first AGP , who was the first manufacture to use AGP (FIC PA-2012?) who was the first Super Socket 7 with AGP to market.
I hate to nitpick but you’re pretty fundamentally wrong about VLB, and PCI being just a condensation thereof. VLB could be *said* to be a 32-bit extension of your standard ISA bus, but that’d be a dramatic oversimplification - it piggybacked on ISA to be assigned IRQs and DMA channels and such but a proper 32-bit extension to ISA would be EISA, a standard notably supported primarily by Compaq as an effort to avoid licensing the micro-channel bus from IBM’s PS/2 line, which was supposed to be the “next generation” PC bus. VLB mapped devices directly into the memory address space of the 486 processor. This is why it was considered so hacky and kludgey even for the time - it made exactly zero effort to future-proof itself. As newer CPUs came out that had different memory maps, VLB would have to be translated - often to PCI, in the case of early Socket 4 Pentium machines. PCI was a solution to offer the theoretical throughput of VLB (I say theoretical because you’d never, ever, *ever* get those speeds over VLB) and then some with the later revisions but in a platform agnostic way. This is why you saw PowerPC Macintosh machines and DEC Alpha workstations implementing it as well. To call it a condensation of VLB is kind of insulting it - it works completely differently. Other than that I have exactly zero complaints! Excellent video!
I've got one of those weird Asrock boards with an "AGI" Slot that looks and acts like an AGP Slot which is of course a bloody hacked pci slot so you never get the full benefit from a good agp card.
If the locking tab is there to suit staggered pins of AGP, why do we still have it with straight-pin PCIe? I hated that tab when AGP was introduced and I hate it even more now that GPUs and CPU coolers are so big.
@@TechGamesAU it's funny reading specs from the early-90s and seeing something boast of a "solid state disk". Because of course I first scan it as meaning NAND flash. But some companies called large ramdisks "SSDs", I guess to sound cooler.
@@kaitlyn__L haha same with old video games like far cry claiming to have ‘HDR’, same terminology for a completely different tech than the HDR we have now
AGP was a good time, but unfortunately also with many problems. Be it with LX chipsets, the power-hungry graphics cards couldn't cope and you had to be afraid that the voltage converters would die... Or also MVP3 and AMD's 750 chipset in which no GeForce cards worked without crashes... Only the slow 1x mode and disable sideband addressing and fastwrites to get the cards working... Or as universal coded cards that didn't work in 2x slots. Yes, we've seen a lot with AGP over the years. It's a pity that you can't buy a bridge adapter to get PCIe cards running on old AGP slots. For PCI there is something like that, I had an old PC from 2000 and a KT133 chipset running with a GTX750. Unfortunately, the PCI bus slows things down quite a bit.
The AGP didn't last long. I remember the different types of AGP Then once the PCI-x come out it was as if they deleted it all together while the PCI still hung on. I may be wrong I think there was a mother board that had both AGP and PCI-x on it but they didn't last long.
PCI wasnt static. PCI-X had version 1.0, 2.0, 2.0b and 3.0 I would liked to have seen more PCI-X 3.0 graphics cards as it could be much faster than AGP 8x
My first PC had AGP.. my first 3d graphic card was PCI..well, not really because it came with a matrox g400 which was a pretty decent graphic card with 3d acceleration for its time and it was agp... so i went backwards....the voodo banshee killed the matrox though....
AFAIK there are not true cards/mobos AGP 8x compatible. This standard was forgotten for the PCIe. PCIe hit hard and quick, but AGP always resisted the transfer rate. For the other hand, I am very surprised by the locking mechanism, I am seeing mobos about years with this but I never thought in this. I always see it as an extra.
Not sure what you mean by "True AGP 8X" since both ATI and nVidia had multiple generations with 8X support. They seem to have avoided the voltage reduction from 1.5 to 0.8, but they still ran at 8X.
Yes, contrary to popular belief, there's a LOT I don't know. But since your comment I read the wiki about it, and the story behind it sounds very familiar. So it might be that I did just forget. It certainly wasn't very widespread, and it's interesting that VLB and PCI caught on but EISA didn't.
@@PixelPipes yes I so thsoe slots in person on server boards, one 486 and pentium Pro ;) BTW it is ISA compatible, unfortunatly as you explained the problem with this teeth design I burned this pro server by removeind standard ISA card from the EISA slot while it was on power :( I was frustrated, becouse the system hanged for who know witch time. I really regret that :((
underrated channel
For sure, it deserves at least an extra zero on the sub count
channel account created 2006
Totally love he's content
very much, yes
I still don't understand why this channel has so fewer subs. The information, footage, edition and narrative are underrated. I've been watching these videos for more than a year and yet I still see the subs count grow quite slowly. Keep up the good work! Someday, UA-cam's algorithm will do some justice.
Because 30 years old boomers probably have more important things to do than watching hardware from their childhood on youtube. :-D
...don't understand why this channel has so fewer subs. The fact he couldn't be arsed to show any AGP cards or do any testing maybe?
I HEAR YOU THERE!!
@@homelessEh Ikr, even two years after this comment I still think the same
So that's how I killed my radeon 9000 pro back in 2004 by not fully inserting it. Now I know dirty little secret of AGP
I miss my Voodoo 3500 TVSE era. I wish I could get back in time, erase my mind and re-discover the pleasure to be amazed by this GPU...
During the lockdown I finally built myself a very fast AGP WindowsXP system and I'm loving it. Specs of my "Ultimate AGP PC": Pentium Dual Core E5800, 2x1GB Kingston DDR-400 cl3, Asrock 775i65G Rev.2.03, Sapphire Radeon HD3850 512MB GDDR3 AGP, SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum, Transcend 32GB SSD, WD Velociraptor 250GB, Corsair CX430, Chieftec Dragon.
sweet setup! I have an AMD FX60 on an MSI K8-Neo2 with Corsair Pro blinkenlights RAM and I use a WD Raptor 10k 36Gb drive, the GPU changes with what I want to do with it but it's most often either a Ti-4600, 6800Ultra, ATi 1950pro or a HD3850 AGP
Nice build! But i would go for 8gb of ram since XP can still hang with 2gb
@@Dragonfire511 I need another motherboard for more. 2GB suits me fine until now tbh
@@KARAOTI23 for retro games its an awesome build.
Oh, that's a rare find! the pentium E5800 is the last LGA 775 CPU so it doesn't work with most older AGP 775 boards. Nice build :). My windows XP PC is an HP Worstation xw4400 and it's pretty overkill for XP, especially with the quad core Xeon CPU I put in it xD. Knowing that it was 2500 bucks In 2006 is mind blowing tho.
Apple sold a bunch of consumer machines with 66MHz and 64-bit PCI slots. They also included PCI-X slots later.
My best agp card ever was a 7800gs. I used a ati 9550 for a LONG time on an old secondary machine, I played a LOT of Call of Duty 4 on it.
my best was the Sapphire Radeon 1950 Pro 256MB, that was a shader monster @the time,
10:04 I still have one of my 939Dual-SATA2, but it just stopped booting one day so I bought another one... then that one did the same thing eventually. I remember upgrading from a GeForce 6200 to a GeForce 8800GT back in the day as a result of that motherboard... what an upgrade!
I had the same problem and I read it is about the bios. Anyway, Asrock is crap :/. I bought an asus high end with 775, and I am so happy.
@@MartinGP_3dfxlegacy Bummer that ASUS is pretty sub par now. I'm legitimately stunned at how awful a lot of their VRM designs are these days.
@@MartinGP_3dfxlegacy You say Asrock is crap, but the funny thing is some of the most desirable retro motherboards to get are old Asrock boards. Their designed might not have captured the attention compared to DFI's fluro UV. But they had very solid designed and are also some of the best for early 2000's XP era retro machines. Especially those rare native 8x AGP & 16X PCIe combo boards.
I had a 939Dual-Sata2. It was great. I had an Athlon 64 3200+ on it, afterwards an Opteron 165. Also my 6600GT AGP, upgraded to 7900GS PCI-e. All on the same board!
Excelent video. Broadly thorough and concise! Precisely what my curiosity wanted to find. Nice work and thank you Pixel Pipes. Pack that raster pipe with some hella dank thermal paste and smoke it! You’ve earned it
Just purchased a prebuilt and noticed the agp setting in the bios, glad I found this video as it explained it nicely and was thinking why would I even need this setting on a 8g video card.
Very nice overview of the tried-and-true AGP bus. I have been tinkering with many motherboards with that slot over the years, very recently putting together a machine with a MSI 694D Pro...implementation of the early 4x slots didn't always pan out like they were supposed to. I'm finding that the early VIA chipsets supporting SMP (this is a dual PIII motherboard) are a great migraine trigger! They were notoriously bad for not running their 4x AGP at 4x. As time goes on, it is also getting harder to find archived forums that detailed the struggles of those that toiled on these machines in that era.
Anyways, I've always appreciated your well written scripts loaded with such good information. (Also, looks like you might have a nice 5950 Ultra on the shelf!)
The last AGP card I owned was the Radeon x800 Pro. It was available in both AGP 8 and PCIe. I was upgrading from an AGP 4 Ti4200. I still own both cards.
I bought an Asrock 939 dual sata 2 so I could keep using my 9700pro AIW. And later upgraded to a 7950GT nvidia
The Ti4200 was my favorite card. I remember back in the day modding the heck out of that card pushing it running on par to a Ti4600.
Cpt Spank it was a seriously powerful card. It even ran Far Cry pretty good many years after the card came out.
Same I had a Saphie version and it was a little beast. Had it on a Socket A machine (which was a bit overkill but it helped ease the CPU’s job).
Good times playing Orange Box games and other mid to late 00’s titles.
The fact that is was exclusive to graphics is kinda special, but actually, when you think about it, most of the time, the first PCIe slot on modern motherboards is 99 % of the time only used for a GPU. ^^
Windows 10 version 1607 dropped support for AGP videocards back in 2016, making Windows 10 1511 the final Windows release to support AGP.
AGP was good but it wasn't all roses all the time. I remember having a fair amount of issues when AGP 4x was released with certain video cards & certain chipsets. There were times when you had to go back to AGP 2x and/or disable fast writes in order to keep things stable.
PCI-E IMO is probably the best interface to come along since the original ISA slots!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't that an issue primarily with VIA chipsets of the time?
@@PixelPipes yeah! Only Intel had the real circuit plans to produce this technology while Via,Ali,SIS did reverse engineering to try do something similar.. speed and stability weren't they highlights but you could at least try with a video card/chipset combination drivers to get the best results
My last AGP Graphic card was Asus GeForce 6600 256 mb, after that I had to say goodbye to my Socket A platform and move on to AM2 with PCI-E.
P.S. As for my first AGP Graphic card, it was Asus AGP V7700Ti/32M (GeForce 2 Ti) and it was great for it's time.
P.S. This is quite a nostalgic UA-cam channel you have here.
Such an amazing video! Subbed! Now I know what to watch on Saturday evenings :-)
Oh I had almost forgotten about AGP, lol. Good video. Comparison speeds of real games would be awesome. Can't wait for that future video :)
My last AGP card was a PNY XLR8 6800GS. By using Riva Tuner I was able to unlock the pixel and vertex pipelines from 12/5 to 16/6 same as the 6800GT. Fun times back then!
Mine was only unlockable to 12/6.
Nathan you're the best explaining computer history. Thanks! P.s. nice lego sets
ooooooh boy. Painful story that agp, with a bit of a happy ending. When we got our first modern PC(for the time), AGP was almost out the door. My 6800GT barely lasted a year. Nvidia's 7xxx series rolled out and it was PCI express only. I could not upgrade my PC. Even my mobos socket was a dead end as there were no dual core CPUs for it. Fortunately Ati released AGP versions of the HD3650 and HD3850. I got the 3850 and it gave my system some more life. I could play mass effect when the PC port hit store shelves and it liven up the frame rate on Oblivion and F.E.A.R
Love your vids Pixel Pipes. Looking forward to that comparison. ;)
AGP - Awesome Graphics Port
Great video enjoyed. New rig looking nice 😎
AGP was dominant in the early to mid 2000’s and I wouldn’t have bought a motherboard without it back then. It allowed GPU’s to escape the backwards compatibility shackles of past times and move forward with the leaps and bounds graphics were makings it was a great thing back then. I had PCI-X on my Tyan motherboard for SCSI U320 adapter but alas no GPU’s used the PCI-X interface at least that I know of. Another great video.
This is probably unexpected, but: thank you. A few years ago some random guy tried to tell me I was lying when I said I'd ogled enthusiast-level systems with PCI-X back in the early 00s. He kept saying they were only ever used in servers and workstations and _never ever_ appeared on even the highest-end home setups. Even though I knew what I remembered, it's still an interaction that's stuck with me. Even after I clarified it was the kind of "workstation at home" user that buys a Threadripper today or a Xeon in the '10s. So, yeah. Thanks for validating that memory!
i love stuff like this always something to learn thanks
I am really enjoying just letting these quality videos play on and on as I do work. PixelPipes is one of the most criminally underratted retro PC tech channels on youtube.
and no loud noises, only boring information that is also interesting. Excellent.
Marvelous review, thank you !
The power pins on the apple cards were for the 24v for the ADC connector.
I still remember the legendary BSODs caused by badly coded AGP drivers. Good times.
....FX 5200 i hate you....
That's driver's in general regardless if it was a PCI, AGP, and PCIe cards, chipset driver's or what have you. Badly written driver's will cause a BSOD.
I remember it took years to get a good VIA driver to run at AGP 4x.
On mainstream desktop PCs, there's only one active 16-lane PCIe slot. Two physical 16 lanes PCIe slots can divide into two active 8-lane. The situation remained almost status quo.
8:01"...and could in theory run without a complete insertion."
True, but a full insertion gives more satisfying results.
Nice Video! Every single information well looked up! Nice!
how i like these videos from the golden age of computers!
Shall be waiting for the benchmarks
I had a 939Dual-Sata2. It was great. I had an Athlon 64 3200+ on it, afterwards an Opteron 165. Also my 6600GT AGP, upgraded to 7900GS PCI-e. All on the same board!
One of my favorites!
I remember my friend Brad, introducing me to AGP, and 3D graphics. He would use futuremark demos, or some other demo, IDK. "Watch, as the plane flies up at you" look at the highlights!, all that jazz. That was in 1998. What I remember most, going to his house, to play a game, made by activision, Battlezone. That was on a Matrox Millenium G200.
Man had I seen this just a week sooner I would of noticed the TNT2 Ultra I picked up was keyed for 3.3v slots only and not realised my blunder until trying to install it in a 865P based board.
Wow I lived thru that era and didn't even realize there was extra danger for AGP cards not 100% inserted!
Bullet dodged 😰
Yep... that's how I killed a 6800 Ultra AGP :(
The other side of the "universal" coin was AGP cards that had both key slots, and would fit (but not always work) in 3.3V boards as well as 1.5V - the compatibility of some older chipsets being hit or miss
yes and those 1.5V boards with good chip set are too expensive to get one ebay now, people want to use AGP 3dfx cards in them! lol
When i was using AGP 8x i used a 6800LE (modded to GT+ unlcked pixpelpipes)
before stepping over to pci-express then i bought a xfx 7900 GT
i remembering some of the Agp cards could still compete with their pci-express counterparts
This video is usefull for those that never owned a agp port or even heard of :)
I still remember using an Intel 740 "starfighter" 8mb card. Had to hold the heatsink on a few times during intense cs1.6 matches when people went nuts with smoke grenades. Smoke made the gpu work HARD. played shogo Mad with some settings tweaks and tachyon the fringe. I was surprised that the gpu never killed itseft when the heatsink fell off. It was thermal glued on. I'm curious to see if the 740 performance would be better with a fast ddr2 system when using dma.
I still have my 6800GS. One of the last great native AGP cards made.
great card had one for a shortwhile
I had love/hate relationship with AGP. The cheap Socket 7 mobos (like Acorp) with non-Intel chipsets had various issues with that interface, often resulting in graphics artifacts in 3D games, so I had to turn off most of the advanced AGP features and downgrade it to simply a high-speed PCI, after spending countless hours in swapping drivers and flipping BIOS/Registry settings.
My last AGP mobo was Abit KV8-Pro and it is where I first managed to get my GeForce 6600GT to play hardware-accelerated HD video (max 720p at that time), thankfully to the proper implementation of the last AGP specs, incl. FastWrites , that allowed direct transfer of data to the GPU.
Honestly, I had a relief after upgrading to PCI-E and leaving the fragile and fragmented AGP standard for good.
Awesome video. I will be looking forward to the PCIe vs AGP video in the future.
I had an ATI x1950 pro agp it was the newest card available that still supported agp. great card btw
Love the videos, keep them coming
Love your videos! Thank you!
There was also AMR. I think it was audio and modem riser. I am not sure when it was completely phased out but I know that I never owned a PC that has it anyhow. It is one of those odd things that was short lived.
Great!
I miss AGP so much... l wish it'd have lasted longer 🏴☠️
I actually had a motherboard from DFI back in the early 2000s that had 2 AGP slots but of course only one could be used at a time. Think I just now figured out why after watching this amazing video ❤️
My last AGP card was the Radeon 9550, i was overclocking the shit out of it, great card for the money.
"Nothing personal"
-PCI Express
The two-level staggered pin system was introduced with EISA in 1988, not Intel Slot-1.
I've been interested in testing AGP vs PCIe but it's really difficult.
The best case scenario is using the asrock 4core dual but even then you're limiting the PCIe version of the card to PCIe 1.1 at 4x lane... I feel that's an unfair comparison
I've been struggling with it for a while. There are solutions that are better than the 4CoreDual but there's always a compromise somewhere.
Asrock 939 dual sata 2. its native 1.1 at 16 lanes. And with the AM2 adapter and bios hack you can use a phenom 1 quad.
@@wishusknight3009 the 939Dual with AM2 card is a good one. But good luck finding that upgrade card. Also ther is an ASRock board called AliveDual-eSATA2, a native AM2 motherboard with PCI-E 16x and AGP 8x. According to ASRock it has a solution with 2 chipsets using a ULi M1695 and an nForce 3 250 Ultra limiting the bus speed of the Phenom processors. Another problem I see is that most more powerful AGP cards use a bridge chip, so that might influence performance as well.
@@PixelPipes Get an 939Dual-sata2 and do 6800 GT native AGP vs native PCI-E, or X800 native AGP vs native PCI-E; it's the only native AGP vs native PCI-E I can think of, however. Later generations used bridge chips like mad.
@@qpwoeiruty668 Had it, used it, reviewed it in a video. It doesn't support enough CPU power. You'd be surprised how far the 16-pipe generation of cards can scale in performance.
My retro pc is rocking an Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2 Rev. 2.0 board with a C2D E8500 and a Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 AGP graphics card. It is a fun little machine.
/me waves his Diamond Viper VLB card with 2MB VRAM from the pre-AGP era
Great vid!!! Waiting for riva128, TNT vs v1, v2
7:10 I have an apple version of the Radeon X800xt, but no Mac to use it with. When I first saw it I thought it was just standard AGP pro.
I know it's hard man, but personally, it would be nice to see you putting out more in-depth content more often, and delving into modern hardware some as well.. in hopes of attracting more people to your channel.
I greatly appreciate your work, and the effort you go to to make the content that you do, and I wish you the best! I hope your channel grows!
Thanks for the kind words! At this point I have no plans to cover modern hardware unless I have a specific retro-inspired (and graphics-related) angle for it. I wish I could put out more content than I do, but I only have so much free time.
You look like Cal Tjader my top favourite jazz vibraphone artist and I'm also a computer freak. You have a great channel and here goes the subscribe too.
So weird seeing something that was once as normal, prevalent and universally accepted as a PCIE slot, and that NO ONE had ANY ISSUES WITH... as being described as "weird" now.
We grew up with AGP. It was one of the only things that mattered for a decade. There was no alternative and why would there be? In fact, it was widely accepted that this is the future- there would be an AGP16, 64, 512 and soforth.
It was the best thing on a motherboard, it was the only thing that counted and it had no issues(except that it's not PCIE... now).
Radeon HD 3850+Core 2 Quad = Gaming Heaven!
It would be like looking back and describing the PCIE-slot as weird and kids of the future thinking- "They played via this thing!?"
Goodbye, good slot! You deserved better. 😀
Excellent video!
PCI could also do two graphics cards simmultaneously.
I always wondered why AGP died, my last agp card was a fx5500, and my first pci-e card was a 6600gt.
I still using my AGP 9550 Pro and 9600XT both from GeCube for my retro gaming...
same here asus 9600xt and 9550 but i love GeCube though
I will never forget my mistake: getting a Radeon HD 3850 AGP… for a Pentium 4 machine. Then got stuck with the card and had to “upgrade” to a newer system with an AGP slot. This was in 2009. Oof.
LOL, did you just do no research prior or did some local seller scam you?
@@armorgeddon I was just a teenager and didn't research too much. I thought that I would be fine with just upgrading the GPU instead of getting a new computer with PCIe (considering the cost as well). Boy, I was wrong.
The missing pin on the GPUs sure was reserve for future RGB lights
I remember seeing benchmarks on the ati 3870 being nearly as fast as it's PCIe version on CompUSA. Only PCIe 2 killed the old Standard
Here’s a trivia question: what was the original name for AGP?
Hint: it had to be changed because of trademark infringement.
I give up, what was it?
PixelPipes AGP was initially: GAP (Graphics Attach Port). A certain retailer had already trademarked GAP.
Intel did work closely with ATI on defining AGP.
One of the reasons ATI surged in market share in the mid 90’s was because of the integrated 3D with AGP2x support (RagePro)
Cool!
Thanks Nathan! That’s was interesting)
Apparently PCI versions of AGP cards could often run at 66 MHz just fine.
Can you possibly do a more in depth look at AGP history , more specifically how it made its way onto socket 7 becoming a socket 7/AGP (NON SUPER 7) and that did not make it a super socket 7 board and how AMDs design of Super Socket 7 helped AGP gain a foot hold. why a Chipsets like SiS5598 is a generic integrated graphics controller and not AGP, though it was thought to be the first AGP chipset - I believe the SiS5592 was SiS first AGP , who was the first manufacture to use AGP (FIC PA-2012?) who was the first Super Socket 7 with AGP to market.
Another Great Presentation.
I hate to nitpick but you’re pretty fundamentally wrong about VLB, and PCI being just a condensation thereof. VLB could be *said* to be a 32-bit extension of your standard ISA bus, but that’d be a dramatic oversimplification - it piggybacked on ISA to be assigned IRQs and DMA channels and such but a proper 32-bit extension to ISA would be EISA, a standard notably supported primarily by Compaq as an effort to avoid licensing the micro-channel bus from IBM’s PS/2 line, which was supposed to be the “next generation” PC bus.
VLB mapped devices directly into the memory address space of the 486 processor. This is why it was considered so hacky and kludgey even for the time - it made exactly zero effort to future-proof itself. As newer CPUs came out that had different memory maps, VLB would have to be translated - often to PCI, in the case of early Socket 4 Pentium machines. PCI was a solution to offer the theoretical throughput of VLB (I say theoretical because you’d never, ever, *ever* get those speeds over VLB) and then some with the later revisions but in a platform agnostic way. This is why you saw PowerPC Macintosh machines and DEC Alpha workstations implementing it as well. To call it a condensation of VLB is kind of insulting it - it works completely differently.
Other than that I have exactly zero complaints! Excellent video!
I've got one of those weird Asrock boards with an "AGI" Slot that looks and acts like an AGP Slot which is of course a bloody hacked pci slot so you never get the full benefit from a good agp card.
It isn't so bad, they only reduce performance by about 60%... plenty for windows solitaire.
Muy buena explicación, muy completa que ni siquiera en mi propio idioma había encontrado, felicitaciones 👌
Exceptions lol the Asrock Dual Sata i have one of these boards.
whenever I put an agp card incorrectly inserted the system would not post. but ive never known a card to short like that one ! interesting ! 😶🌫🧐
If the locking tab is there to suit staggered pins of AGP, why do we still have it with straight-pin PCIe? I hated that tab when AGP was introduced and I hate it even more now that GPUs and CPU coolers are so big.
Alas agp we hardly knew ye.
I’ve always wondered if they ever made non video card agp cards. Like an agp ssd, or amd agp lan card or usb card.
Nah back then SSDs didn’t exist and lan cards were only 100 mbps anyway. USB 2.0 was somewhere around 60mbps. So the PCI slots were good enough.
There was agp scsi.
@@TechGamesAU it's funny reading specs from the early-90s and seeing something boast of a "solid state disk". Because of course I first scan it as meaning NAND flash. But some companies called large ramdisks "SSDs", I guess to sound cooler.
@@kaitlyn__L haha same with old video games like far cry claiming to have ‘HDR’, same terminology for a completely different tech than the HDR we have now
@@TechGamesAU flashbacks to explaining to some very confused people that the PS3’s “HDR rendering” is totally unrelated to HDR10 video, in 2017
What are the 10 fastest AGP 1.0 2X compatible graphics cards??
Thank you
AGP was a good time, but unfortunately also with many problems. Be it with LX chipsets, the power-hungry graphics cards couldn't cope and you had to be afraid that the voltage converters would die... Or also MVP3 and AMD's 750 chipset in which no GeForce cards worked without crashes... Only the slow 1x mode and disable sideband addressing and fastwrites to get the cards working... Or as universal coded cards that didn't work in 2x slots. Yes, we've seen a lot with AGP over the years. It's a pity that you can't buy a bridge adapter to get PCIe cards running on old AGP slots. For PCI there is something like that, I had an old PC from 2000 and a KT133 chipset running with a GTX750. Unfortunately, the PCI bus slows things down quite a bit.
Actually EISA have that staggered pin before Slot-1 CPU did ..
You should put out more videos m8.
The AGP didn't last long. I remember the different types of AGP Then once the PCI-x come out it was as if they deleted it all together while the PCI still hung on. I may be wrong I think there was a mother board that had both AGP and PCI-x on it but they didn't last long.
PCI wasnt static.
PCI-X had version 1.0, 2.0, 2.0b and 3.0
I would liked to have seen more PCI-X 3.0 graphics cards as it could be much faster than AGP 8x
My first PC had AGP.. my first 3d graphic card was PCI..well, not really because it came with a matrox g400 which was a pretty decent graphic card with 3d acceleration for its time and it was agp... so i went backwards....the voodo banshee killed the matrox though....
Bro it is good to know that fake agp exists on hybrid motherboards
He's back!
1:47 PCI is not the VLB bus condensed, PCI and VLB buses are not the same thing at all
WE NEED THE BENCHMARK!! HAHA
AFAIK there are not true cards/mobos AGP 8x compatible. This standard was forgotten for the PCIe. PCIe hit hard and quick, but AGP always resisted the transfer rate.
For the other hand, I am very surprised by the locking mechanism, I am seeing mobos about years with this but I never thought in this. I always see it as an extra.
Not sure what you mean by "True AGP 8X" since both ATI and nVidia had multiple generations with 8X support.
They seem to have avoided the voltage reduction from 1.5 to 0.8, but they still ran at 8X.
I remember having an Asus socket 775 motherboard that had AGP and PCI Express
Maybe you had an Asrock mobo
:D new video. I like your video's
You forgot the 32bit EISA have the same principle like AGP those teeth pins :)
forgot? or....was never actually aware until you told me 😅
That's interesting though! Might be the first instance of that.
@@PixelPipesWoW oh I am surprised that you do not know about that! :)
Yes, contrary to popular belief, there's a LOT I don't know.
But since your comment I read the wiki about it, and the story behind it sounds very familiar. So it might be that I did just forget. It certainly wasn't very widespread, and it's interesting that VLB and PCI caught on but EISA didn't.
@@PixelPipes yes I so thsoe slots in person on server boards, one 486 and pentium Pro ;) BTW it is ISA compatible, unfortunatly as you explained the problem with this teeth design I burned this pro server by removeind standard ISA card from the EISA slot while it was on power :( I was frustrated, becouse the system hanged for who know witch time. I really regret that :((
I only used high end asus motherboards!
Dude i never saw a Molex connector on a gpu
They were on the Voodoo 5 cards.