Upgrading AGP video card

I am needing to do some video editing and want to upgrade my video
card. My current operating system is Windows XP SP3. The board's
processor is a 1GHz processor (AMD Athlon) with 1024MB of RAM.

I have one AGP slot (2.0 compliant) and an empty PCI slot below it.
My motherboard (Gigabyte 7ZX) BIS can go up to 4x but the Catalyst
driver is seeing my current ATI Radeon 7000 VE as a 2x with no Fast
Write. The card has 64MB of onboard memory.

Would an 8x work on this board? , should I go for just a 4x, 2x/4x
or a 4x/8x card?

Thanks in advance!

BarryB wrote:
I am needing to do some video editing and want to upgrade my video
card. My current operating system is Windows XP SP3. The board's
processor is a 1GHz processor (AMD Athlon) with 1024MB of RAM.
>
I have one AGP slot (2.0 compliant) and an empty PCI slot below it.
My motherboard (Gigabyte 7ZX) BIS can go up to 4x but the Catalyst
driver is seeing my current ATI Radeon 7000 VE as a 2x with no Fast
Write. The card has 64MB of onboard memory.
>
Would an 8x work on this board? , should I go for just a 4x, 2x/4x
or a 4x/8x card?
>
Thanks in advance!


There was a big change in slots between 2x and 4x AGP. The 8x AGP just
uses the same slot as the 4x.

Regarding video editing, that's a very CPU intensive activity, and the
video card is not really involved in that. So you can upgrade your AGP,
but I doubt you'll find any performance difference. The speed of the
graphics card connector is more important when playing games, where a
lot of the game graphics is actually done on the fly in the video card.
Video editing on the other hand is mainly carried out through the CPU,
and transferred relatively quickly through the AGP as just raw video, no
processing really done on the GPU.

Yousuf Khan

Yousuf Khan schrieb:

There was a big change in slots between 2x and 4x AGP. The 8x AGP just
uses the same slot as the 4x.

I remember that some voltages got changed too, so putting a very old
and nonstandard gfx board into a new mother board could fry both.

Regarding video editing, that's a very CPU intensive activity, and the
video card is not really involved in that. So you can upgrade your AGP,

Even within games the AGP bus speed is pretty much useless, I didn't
notice the slightest change when I played around with my Geforce6800 and
AGPx1 and AGPx8. And if the fastest native AGP solution doesn't profit
from higher AGP speeds, what solution does?

(native solution like in "everything later was already PCIe with a
bridge solution")

Christian Brandt