opinion: fastest agp board

I'm still slugging it out with 478pin p4 agp technology.
Can anyone tell me what the fastest agp board is, since I'm not in the
market to jump to pci-e yet...
I have 4gbs of ocz platinum pc3200 ram and an ATI x850xt platinum
video...thanks very much.

"Luvrsmel" wrote in message ...
I'm still slugging it out with 478pin p4 agp technology.
Can anyone tell me what the fastest agp board is, since I'm not in the
market to jump to pci-e yet...
I have 4gbs of ocz platinum pc3200 ram and an ATI x850xt platinum
video...thanks very much.

ATI makes a 3850 AGP. That's the fastest. But at anything over
1024x768 resolution in most newer games, you'll be severely CPU
limited with any S478 P4.

Luvrsmel wrote:
I'm still slugging it out with 478pin p4 agp technology.
Can anyone tell me what the fastest agp board is, since I'm not in the
market to jump to pci-e yet...
I have 4gbs of ocz platinum pc3200 ram and an ATI x850xt platinum
video...thanks very much.


I use an Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2 motherboard, as it supports
AGP video cards, and accepts Core2 processors. But it is
hardly a full featured motherboard. It has two DDR slots and
two DDR2 slots for memory (use only one type at a time).
I simply got 2x1GB of DDR2 for it, and didn't bother reusing
my existing 2x512MB of DDR. DDR2 is dirt cheap, compared to
the price I paid for the other memory. One thing I've found
about this board, is memory bandwidth is on the low end of
the scale.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.as...2%20R2.0&s=775

So that is a mechanism to reuse an AGP video card, if that
is what you're looking for. The processor socket is LGA775
on that one, and allows upgrading to faster Core2 processors.
I use an E4700 processor with it, but it turns out the
board needs to be hacked to overclock it (I've run the processor
at 3.46GHz, by boosting Vcore with a soldering iron). So
using an FSB1066 processor is probably the best you can do
if you don't own a soldering iron. For example, the E7300
is probably relatively cheap ($120), compared to some of the other
entries.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/cpu.asp?Mod...2%20R2.0&s=775

These are my results from testing yesterday. (The hyphens are
to try to preserve the formatting, when archived in Google.)
The DDR2-533 memory is running 3-3-3-12 1T.

-------------------------------------------------------SuperPI Memtest 1.65
-------------------------------------------------------1M (sec) Bandwidth
-------------------------------------------------------lower is (MB/sec)
------------------------------------------------------- better

200 x 13 = 2.60GHz, FSB800, DDR2-533, Single channel 24.05 2203
(stock) Dual channel 22.87 2668

266 x 10 = 2.66GHz, FSB1066, DDR2-533, Single channel 23.47 ----
Dual channel 22.52 ----

266 x 13 = 3.46GHz, FSB1066, DDR2-533, Single channel 19.37 2419
Dual channel 18.42 3305

For comparison, you can test SuperPI and calculate 1 million digits
of PI and compare your current time. On my 3200+ and P4 3.1GHz
systems, I'd get about 45 to 50 seconds for 1 million digits.
SuperPI runs on one core of a processor.

http://www.xtremesystems.com/pi/
http://www.xtremesystems.com/pi/super_pi_mod-1.5.zip

I think the current record for 1 million digits, is below 8 seconds,
so I have a ways to go yet.

HTH,
Paul