FX5200 AGP 3.0 x8 on ASUS P2B mobo, works on 3.3V ok?

wrote:

Has anyone tried using an FX5200 AGP 3.0 x8 card on an ASUS P2B
motherboard (rev 1.1 or something like that) which is only AGP 1.0,
x2, 3.3V? In particular, an MSI FX5200-T128, 64-bit, half height,
passively cooled card (one of an apparently endless number of minor
variants of FX5200 MSI has, judging from their tech support section).

All the info on the web/usenet indicates it should work fine, and the
universal AGP connector of the card (keyed for both 3.3V and 1.5/0.8V)
further affirms this.

But... I asked MSI's tech support and they say "no". I assume their
tech drones are either not very knowledgeable or they have no
"official endorsement" for such usage (although I can't think of
reason for them to do that).



Hi!



when it have two notches and it fits without decent force into the P2B
AGP Slot, then it should work satisfying.
With a max. of, 2xAGP and Sideband Addressing enabled, of course. No
Fast Writeand no 4x or 8x AGP. (The difference between 2x and 1x is
moot, between 2x and 4x even more. 8x makes just troubles IMO for that
1-3%....Fast-Writes?? well...)



Good Luck!




Best Regards,

Daniel Mandic

P.S.: Why not a Quadra PNY Decent-4chip GeForce??? ... they have 3.3V
notch as well. A must for the mighty BX chipset, IMHO . I go well
with the decent 10bit-DAC Matrox Parhelia 512bit, a wonderful 2D Card
and not so slow with 3D Stuff (~GF4ti)

Thanks all for the info.

I'll try the card and report back the results for the sake of future
generations.

The card's an MSI FX5200-T128 8936-290, BTW.

Daniel Mandic wrote:
when it have two notches and it fits without decent force...

Yeah, I mentioned it's keyed for 3.3V as well. The problem is that some
companies abuse the specs (like Paul's 9800 Pro). It is unfortunate
that they can release AGP hardware that doesn't follow the specs.

Why not a Quadra PNY Decent-4chip GeForce

Doesn't sound like a good general purpose card.

...Matrox Parhelia 512bit, a wonderful 2D Card and not so slow with 3D Stuff

But hardly a de facto standard when it comes to games. I'd rather go
with a Ti4200.

Ehud Shapira wrote:

But hardly a de facto standard when it comes to games. I'd rather go
with a Ti4200.


Yes, of course. GF4ti is fast compared to its age.

I play here Star Wars 'Empire on War' TM 2006 . It works fluent.
Even with my older Matrox G450 I have been used to play any Game I have
liked and still like. Well, 'EoW' would be impossible on a card w/o T&L
Unit.

The GF3ti is also quite well (T&L capable) and makes a much better
impression to me in 2D GDI/Windows etc.-Performance, than the GF4ti,
which makes on the other hand much more hardware-effects (DX8 - DX7).
The Parhelia
can do the same amount of D3D-effects (DX8), if not more than the 4ti,
IMHO.
Not to mention the crisp picture and the 1024 (10bit-DAC) possible
colors p/pixel ;-)


Look out that your card has a 128bit (or more) broad memory interface.
I know about 128MB cards with 64bit VRAM-interface... not a good choice
IMO for D3D and OpenGL stuff.



Best Regards,

Daniel Mandic

Ok, it's checked. The MSI works. Tried some 3D, and it works fine.

I'm getting strangely low framerates in Unreal Tournament (the
original), but I guess it's a drive issues or something similar -- it
runs ok windowed, but very slow fullscreen. But that's an entirely
different matter...

Summary:

* MSI FX5200-T128 (8936-290) works fine with 3.3V/AGP 1.0.
* 1.5 points down to MSI for bad support from the US branch, and a 5
day response time from the Taiwan branch (with irrelevant reply).
* 2 points down to ASUS for not bothering to answer at all.

----

The GF3ti is also quite well (T&L capable) and makes a much better
impression to me in 2D GDI/Windows etc.-Performance, than the GF4ti,
Are you talking about image quality? Surely all modern cards for some
years now have more power than needed for 2D.

Look out that your card has a 128bit (or more) broad memory interface.
No, it's 64-bit. I wonder why it's called FX5200-T128... And there are
no
5200s with 128-bit bus.

not a good choice IMO for D3D and OpenGL stuff.
Of course the more, the better, but that's what I have and it's still
better than
the card it replaces.

Ehud Shapira wrote:

Are you talking about image quality? Surely all modern cards for some
years now have more power than needed for 2D.

Of course the more, the better, but that's what I have and it's still
better than
the card it replaces.


Hi Ehud!



I have seen working the mighty BX with much older cards. All PCI and
ISA-AT, even 8bit-ISA should work nice


The GF3Ti is faster in Windows/GDI than the GF4ti (IMHO). Many decent
3d cards give not so good GDI performance. The Picture Quality depends
much to the value/price of the Card and most of the cheap decent 3D
cards, lack overclockability (lower chip-quality).



All at all, I would not await truecolor 3D performance with a 64bit
RAM-IF 3D-Card.

Changing to 640x480 or 800x600 in 16bit (enough for Street-Fighter, for
example -arcade game machine) should to the trick! Just an example of
the meaning of 128bit and broader IF's, which do 32bit (24bit
truecolor) much faster and to higher resolutions.

Your FX5200 should be able to do 1024x768 in 16bit. My old card wankled
between 800x600 and 1024x768 in 16bit. 'NwN' for example, have only
been able in 800x600. At 1024 it dropped too much...
But GDI was Ok and fast, even with 32bit colors enabled!
The new GfX-Card pushed my machine (GDI...) forward, that I have the
feeling of something modern, between 1.6 and 2.0GHz, and, let's say a
MX400-AGP [GF4, 64bitRAM], yet.





Best regards,

Daniel Mandic


ASUS P2B-F 1,00
iP3-S 'Tualatin'
FSB103 ;-)
SB AWE64 Gold

Ehud Shapira wrote:
Ok, it's checked. The MSI works. Tried some 3D, and it works fine.

I'm getting strangely low framerates in Unreal Tournament (the
original), but I guess it's a drive issues or something similar -- it
runs ok windowed, but very slow fullscreen. But that's an entirely
different matter...

Summary:

* MSI FX5200-T128 (8936-290) works fine with 3.3V/AGP 1.0.
* 1.5 points down to MSI for bad support from the US branch, and a 5
day response time from the Taiwan branch (with irrelevant reply).
* 2 points down to ASUS for not bothering to answer at all.

----

The GF3ti is also quite well (T&L capable) and makes a much better
impression to me in 2D GDI/Windows etc.-Performance, than the GF4ti,
Are you talking about image quality? Surely all modern cards for some
years now have more power than needed for 2D.

Look out that your card has a 128bit (or more) broad memory interface.
No, it's 64-bit. I wonder why it's called FX5200-T128... And there are
no
5200s with 128-bit bus.

not a good choice IMO for D3D and OpenGL stuff.
Of course the more, the better, but that's what I have and it's still
better than
the card it replaces.


To give you a data point, I reinstalled the driver for my Geforce3 TI200
on my P2B-S machine with Win98SE, and 3DMark2000 benchmark, went up from
4000 to 5100 (and it was the same version of driver, not a different one).
I don't know how to explain that. (And since I long ago used up my
Powerstrip evaluation period, I cannot check the options panel to see
whether it is set up right or not. If I had an ATI card, I could have used
the SmartGART tab to check it, but this is an Nvidia card, and my next
choice would be Powerstrip.)

Sometimes, what is happening, is the bus interface to the card is in
PCI mode. It looks like the card is fully accelerated, except when a
lot of data is being moved to the card. You should check and see
whether AGP is really there or not.

As far as I know, Powerstrip still has an evaluation period. You can download
it from Entechtaiwan.com and install it for testing purposes. When installed,
there is an icon on the taskbar. Right clicking brings up a popup menu,
and there is an item called Options. Check in the screen there, to see
whether AGP is enabled, and DMA or DIME mode is being used. If instead
of DMA or DIME, you see "Disabled", then you've still got some fixing to
do. This is an example picture of the Powerstrip window in question,
and the card they are checking, is using DMA mode for textures:

http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpfix/powerstrip2.gif

Paul

Paul, you mean about UT99? The issues I'm having are most likely driver
related. But I probably shouldn't dicuss this on an ASUS mobos group.


The card works in AGP x2, as expected, BTW. No problem with that.