agp compared to pci graphics card

I just got my older computer fixed at the local shop. The shop owner replaced my old 755-a2 mobo with a newer board. It required a pci card however. He said he could swap me out for a 256 mb. However, he originally wanted to swap me out for a 128 mb. I told him that I liked my card and just bought that one and that it was a 512 mb. He said then, "Well let me see if I have a 256 card." He said he would put in the 256 pci card and that I wouldn't notice any difference in graphics because it's a newer card. But you all know how system requirements on computer games can be. What do you think? Thanks


nVIDIA Gforce 7600 GS DDR2 512MB AGP I don't know what I'll have now.

 

First off graphics card memory isnt everything. There are alot of other specs to consider. Just to be clear will your new board have a PCI slot or 16x PCI Express slot?

In general cards follow this hierarchy PCI<AGP<16x PCI Express.

If the board is new it'll probably be a 16x PCI express but depending on the card your current could still be superior. Find out exactly what card you'll be getting and we can tell you if its gonna be better or worse.

 

Do you mean it has onboard video and your only option for an add-on video card is a PCI card? I think that technician should have discussed the choice of motherboard with you and explained the options before installing a new motherboard.

Are you sure it does not have a PCI Express slot? A PCI Express video card is the way to go, not a PCI card.

 

You guys are right. It does have a pci express slot, not just pci. Xcuse me, how could I ever confuse those two? Kidding. Anyway, I have an update, but a new problem. I've been harped on for not being specific enough, but I've also been harped on for being too lengthly in my posts. So, I'll try shooting for a perfect balance.

My old mobo went dead. Now, I have a new one. Before i took the new one in, I upgraded my processor to a considerably better one. Say, from an amd sempron 2600+ to an athlon 64 4800+. But, they put in a newer mobo, so they had to put in a newer ddr2 ram instead of ddr, and a newer pci-e video card (i think, i'll list them in a second). And, it is a better mobo, I'm sure. Basically, the whole computer, by every right, should be much better.

HOWEVER, it is not running like it! Let me make it clear, though, that I do NOT suspect the shop owner of trying to rip me off. Actually, quite the contrary, The DDR2 was "on the house", he could have certainly charged me for that, as it was a 1 gig, for 1 gig swap! They're very fair and work with me well. The problem is, with my old mobo and all the older parts, my old computer was STILL faster. I can't seem to figure that one out. Here is what I had then to what I have now.

Then
Nvidia Geforce 7600 GS agp 8x 512 mb

amd celeron 2600+

1 GB ddr sdram (pc3200, I think)

ecs 755-a2 mobo

Now
PCI-E x16 port #0 In Use @ x16 (NVIDIA GeForce 7100 GS [NoDB]) 512 mb

amd Athlon 64 4800+

1 GB pc3200 DDR2 sdram

Motherboard ID SiS-761GX-6A7IDFKAC-00 Box says: WinFast 761GXK8MC


And, it's running SLOWER! How can that be. It's also interesting that when I run Oblivion, I get this message, "cannot detect video hardware, defaulting to medium graphic settings." Also, in Oblivion, it indicates that it does NOT support HDR effects, which my older card did, that makes no sense if this is a newer card. My other games are bogging a little too, just a little less than before, but they don't get this message.

Please answer this question, if nothing else, "is this graphics card worse than my old AGP 8x 7600 nvidia card?

Thanks...

gf

 

I've been reading reviews on the Nvidia 7100 gs and most of them say it's a 256 mb card that has a turbo cache supporting 512 mb. So, maybe that's why it is showing up in my Lavalys Everest Software as being a 512 mb video card? Either way, it is SLI technology ready and is pci express. It's supposed to be a pretty good card. I would think it would be atleast as good as the one I had in.

 

O.k. this is my 3rd post tonight, but I had to modify my earlier post. The message that I get when starting Oblivion is this, "Video Hardware unrecognized. video quality settings defaulting to medium quality". Which SUCKS.

 

Before anyone just takes a wild guess, I have been googling a lot tonight. Apparently, the biggest problem with Oblivion and "newer" video cards is an incompatibility with the drivers. So, that doesn't help me much though. I still don't know if this card is really an upgrade from my last card, nor do I know why all my other games are running a little slower than with my older system. I wanted an upgrade in performance overall. All I got for my bucks was a bogged down computer. If I revert to an older driver with my graphics card, will that help? As if I knew how to do that.

 

Even though the PCI Express slot is faster, the AGP video card was a MUCH better card in my opinion. Anyone who knows alot about video cards will probably agree with me. The 7600 has faster clock speeds, it has a 128bit bus, and has a devoted 512mb on board. The 7100 has s l o w clock speeds, a 64bit bus, and uses "turbo cache" which means it actually uses some of the main PC memory in addition to the memory it has on board. Oblivion is a fairly high end game, and the 7100 is a fairly low end card. This is probably why you are having the problems and this slow video card is the bottleneck in the whole PC as far as hardware goes. A new 7100 card is only about $35.00. A new 7600 is about $80.00. It was probably over $120 when you bought it. You can check with the Oblivion web site for a possible patch for the 7100, or maybe try the newest drivers from nVidia, but it is still a lesser card. Here's a reference chart of nVidia chips and their respective speeds. Notice the difference between the 7100 and 7600, the main difference is the bus and the pipelines....
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/132

 

Nah, not hard to find. Newegg.com has 80 of them listed.

 

Have you tried uninstalling the old drivers and installing new ones?

Fortunately with a PCI express slot you can find a card that will blow your old one out of the water for relatively cheap.

 

Really...hmmmm....like how relatively cheap?

Also, thanks MK for the Viper's site. I will definitely be checking that out! I'm all about tweaks. I will do everything I can to twist my pc into a freakish gaming machine. The only thing I steer clear of is overclocking, still over my head. I was wondering, though, how you can know how much to overclock and still stay in the REAL safe zone. I'm very risk averse. Yes, I'm running XP version 2002, service pack 2. Also, thanks dlb for the post. I think that you hit the nail right on the head, especially about the price of my "old" card. You helped confirm my suspician about the bogging. I seriously don't think that the shop owner really thought that it would be all that different on my system though, comp technician doesn't necessarily equal graphics nerd. And, they really did upgrade, basically my entire system. Anyway, I'm going to take a look at those tweaks now. Thanks for all the responses.

 

Hmmmm.... did anyone read my post (#8 in this thread)? The new 7100 PCIX video card is totally low end, about as low end as a PCIX can get. IMO, the PC store owes him a card that is at least equal to what he originally had. Ideally, the OP should shell out a bit more dough and go for a 8600GT.... great bang for the buck. And the PC shop should take the 7100 back, offer credit towards a better card, or put in a card equal to the original 7600GT AGP card.

 

thats very true. They should have given you like for like . the 7100 is for solitaire and email basically. Sure it will handle a few games but not on the supported list for most newer games

 

Just like to let everyone know that I will be getting a newer video card. When I took my pc back to the shop and showed them how much the 7100 sucked, they went ahead and ordered me a new one. I live in a small town. I gather that they don't get many gamers at the old shop.

I'll let everyone know what I get installed! I hope it's a little better than my old 7600.

 

Glad to hear they'll take the 7100 back. I think dlb is correct -- that's a dog that won't hunt, at least it won't "hunt" even a moderately demanding 3D game. It's tempting to oversimplify and say PCI-E(xpress) is better than AGP, and AGP is better than plain vanilla PCI, but you still have to look at the specs for a particular card. Just because newer motherboards nearly all have PCI-E graphics slots doesn't mean everyone wants to pay more bucks for even a modestly priced graphics card if they can get by with a really cheap card, such as a 7100, to just surf the web a bit and read emails.

An 8600 GT would be great if you can afford it, GT, but I think even a 7600 would be a big improvement over the 7100. And don't forget to try to get hold of a trial version of GameOS or GameAccelerator. Using those programs to reduce the background load on your system is a lot easier than going through the hassle each gaming session of trying to identify and shut down individually all the power robbing processes you don't need running to play most games.

Let us know what you get and how it works out.

 

you need to install updated drivers that card is better then what you had the older drivers are hold it back
also make sure both power connectors are pluged in to the card some have 2 but only need one to boot but 2 is needed for max FPS

 

:celebrate :highfive :hyper :drink :dancer
:cool Fan-freekin'-tastic!!!
Glad to hear it! If you have questions, let us know. :major

 

Hey, everyone. Quick responses needed. The techies told me to bring my pc in tomorrow. But, they are now saying that the new pci-e 7100 should be better than my old card. The technician talked to someone who told him that he may just have to disable the on-board graphics. Doesn't sound good to me. But, then if I knew for sure, I wouldn't be typing this. Who knows better? :confused

 

The onboard graphics should definitely be disabled -- that's correct. I guess what the people at the computer shop are suggesting is that they may have left the onboard graphics chip turned on so that it's either overriding the installed PIC-E graphics card or at least interfering with it.

Your motherboard is apparently manufactured by FoxConn. I downloaded your mobo manual and read a bit to see what I could find about the BIOS settings for the onboard graphics. I found only that there are settings for onboard graphics (dohhh), but no detailed information in the manual about what those settings are. (The mobo manual demons strike again.)

I've seen motherboards with onboard graphics that allow a setting which makes the onboard graphics override an installed graphics card or which may be set to activate (the onboard graphics that is) only if no graphics card is installed. So it's possible your motherboard isn't using the 7100 graphics card at all except...according to a review I found of the FoxConn/WinFast 761GXK8MC-S (a slightly different model but I'm not sure how exactly) the onboard graphics are incapable of running even a moderately demanding (by todays standards) 3D game, such as Doom 3. That review begins here:

http://www.pcstats.com/artvnl.cfm?articleID=1887

And on this page...

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1887&page=11

note the testing frame rates for various mobos running Doom 3, including the 761GXK8MC-S down at the bottom. The zero frame rate indicated is for the board running with the onboard graphics, while the 103.2 fps rating is with a 7800GTX graphics card installed. So, assuming your onboard graphics setup is the same as the "-S" model, you likely wouldn't be able to run Oblivion at all if your computer was using that mobo's onboard graphics. Maybe the onboard graphics are interfering though, but I doubt that's the real problem. And I'd wonder about the competence of a shop that would neglect to turn off the onboard graphics after installing a graphics card, though at least they're willing to check that possibility for you.

I don't know how likely it is that the slow game speeds you're experiencing are perhaps partially due to a conflict between the onboard graphics and the installed graphics card. But whether or not that's occuring I don't think the 7100 GS graphics card is going to run as fast as your old AGP slot card which was a 7600 GS, right?

Both cards have the same amount of onboard memory, 512 MB. And it's true that the new installed 7100 is designed to work in a PCI-E graphics slot rather than the older, slower (in theory) AGP graphics slot your old card used. But having a faster slot will only help your games run faster if a faster "engine" is installed in that slot. And that's clearly not the case. The 7100 is markedly slower than a 7600 based card with the same amount of RAM.

I know you probably don't want to spend even more cash, but I truly think you're not going to be satisfied with a 7100 card. There's little point, if you want to play 3D games, in buying a motherboard with a PCI-E(xpress) graphics slot and then running a 7100 graphics card in that slot. It's a bit like buying a sports car and putting a small underpowered engine in it. What's the point?

If you really don't want to spring for whatever additional money it would cost to buy a 7600 GS (or better yet a GT), I think you'd be better off buying a motherboard with an AGP slot and using your old 7600 graphics card, if that's still an option and if you can return the DDR2 RAM and get your old RAM back (assuming the AGP slot mobo you might wind up getting can't use the faster DDR2 RAM).

I think I recall you mentioning in another post that there aren't any large electronic stores near you so this may not be much help. Just yesterday I was in my local Best Buy and found a BFG (that's the brand name) PCI-E slot 8600 GT graphics card with 512 MB's of DDR3 RAM for $80.99 which I thought was quite a deal, so I picked one up. I installed it and it's definitely a noticeable improvement over my older 256 MB ATI 1300X Radeon I was running. I maxed out my Oblivion graphics settings for the first time and my system kept the game running smoothly with no problems or noticeable slowdowns or jerkiness. It's true I have a faster CPU and, I think, more and faster RAM, but still for $81 it's a heckuva deal that should be more than adequate to keep up if and when you're able to upgrade your cpu and RAM again.

And if Best Buy has marked this model down so much (it was formerly selling in the $250 range, as most other similarly equipped nVidia chip based graphics cards were the last time I looked -- about 10 days ago) then NewEgg and others may be selling them at similar markdowns. And maybe your local shop can obtain one for you, if not quite that cheap at least in that ballpark. I like supporting local shops when I can, even if it costs me a bit more. Unfortunately, with competition from the big stores and the internet, the small local shop I used to support and which always treated me well, closed up. So now I buy most of my stuff at the big stores or online.

Whatever you decide to do, I don't think you're going to find the 7100 acceptable after getting used to a 7600, even though your 7600 was an AGP slot design.

Hope this is some help. Good luck!

 

Eezak is right on with his above post. The 7100 is bottom of the line. I'm not making a judgement call, it really is the cheapest PCIe video made by nVidia. New ones are less than $30. The 8600 is such an amazing value in video cards these days, that I'm continually blown away by 'em. Incredible "bang-for-the-buck"... instead of buying the 7100, save your money until you can afford a better card and just use the on board video. The 7100 won't be much (if any) improvement over the built in video, so it's like flushing the money down the toilet to buy a 7100....

I would be leary of a shop that thinks a PCIe 7100 is better than an AGP 7600. They obviously have not done any homework on the subject. Just because it's newer, current technology doesn't make it better. I have an ATI x1950 AGP card that will smoke MANY of these newer PCIe cards....

 

I found this entry at Wikipedia summarizing the performance of cards using the nVidia 7 family of graphics chips:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_7_Series

Note the summary table at the immediate top right of this page which characterizes the 7100 chip as an "entry level" graphics chip -- i.e. lowest price, while the 7600 chip is in the mid-range. It's true that a particular manufacturer of a graphics card may be able to eek out a bit of additional performance by overclocking and otherwise doing some better engineering than another company. But while these kinds of engineering and manufacturing tweaks may result in real but small variations in speed/power between different brands based on the same graphics chip, they aren't going to overcome the differences in processing power of two different graphics cards based on GPU's having markedly different capabilities. Putting a board based on a less powerful chip, the 7100, in a PCI-E slot cannot perform magic and enable it to outperform a significantly more powerful chip, the 7600, running in an AGP slot.

 

PCI Express offers performance of up to 4 times faster than the fastest AGP slot.

Pci > AGP. what is the card he is installing?

Read that below,
http://www.cryosphere.f2s.com/articles/computers/PCI-Express-vs-AGP.html

 

Xdamn, if you wish to understand, read the posts. Don't ask us to repeat the information we've already taken the time to provide in response the poster's questions.

What it all boils down to is that a slower card in a (theoretically) faster slot won't beat a faster card running in a (theoretically) slower slot. At least not when you're talking about a 7100 based graphics card (PCI-E) vs.a 7600 based graphics card (AGP).

"PCI Express offers performance of up to 4 times faster than the fastest AGP slot.

Pci > AGP. what is the card he is installing?"

The info is here in the thread posts -- just read.

 

You got that backwards. AGP > PCI. And, PCI Express > AGP. Putting all three together, PCI Express > AGP > PCI.

 

OOPS I MENT... PCIe > AGP...

 

Ment > as in greater than.. my apologies. pcie great than agp

 

Hey everyone. Got an update. Today I cringed as I brought my pc in, but they got me up and running to par. Free of charge. It was all a part of the 150 plus tax I shelled out to get the Mobo fixed.

They ended up putting in a Geforce 7300 GT. It runs every bit as good as it did. And, this one supports HDR lighting, so I don't have to say goodbye to that for now. Whew! Little too close, for me.

NICE link btw Eezak. Very, very nice. I was able to go in and compare the vid cards for myself for once! It would appear as though the 7300 GT is very slightly a lesser card than the one I have...BUT, I have a more upgradeable pc with newer and faster components overall AND it seems to run just a smidgen faster. So I'm not going to complain. HOWEVER, and I'm not too sure about this but, I think, MAYBE, they may have overclocked the core clock, prior to letting me try it out at the shop. Yep, bein' a trite tricky me thinks.

But, I can't make that judgment. I just don't know that for sure. All I'm going on is the fact that when I looked at the new v-tune software on my pc, with the 7100 gs in, the clock speed meters were both well down under the "green," in spite of their respective speeds (core 400 and memory 500 default). When I got the pc home today (with the new 7300 gt in), I checked the clocking meters and the core clock dial was all the way up by the yellow mark at 500 mhz. The memory dial was still down low but it was already at 700 mhz. I looked at the link to check for default core speeds for the 7300 gt but couldn't find anything.

Whatever the case, I'm still not complaining. I really would have liked to oc it myself, but you know, for the price I paid, I probably got a reasonable deal.

 

Actually, I need to add a little to that last post. The other thing that tipped me off was that when they unhooked my pc at the shop and gave it back to me, they forgot their cd in the dvd drive. It had some over-clocking software on it.

Anyway, saying that they did overclock it, why wouldn't they have over-clocked the memory clock just a little too. Cr@p, if your going to do it, then do it man! I mean they didn't move the memory clock up even a tiny bit. Why did they choose the core clock?

 

Can't answer any of your questions with certainty, GF, but here are a few ideas.

Some models of some brands of graphics cards are "overclocked-out-of-the-box". That means they are setup overclocked at the factory and have the built-in fan cranked up a bit higher or are otherwise designed to take care of the additional heat that overclocking causes. But...

While the CD the shop left in the drive could have had some other software on it that was useful in setting up your computer with the new graphics card, I'd guess they did actually overclock the card after installing it. If you check online at the manufacturer's website and look up your specific model the info/description for the card should tell you whether or not the card is factory overclocked. Furthermore, you should be able to find specifically what the core clock is set to before it leaves the factory.

As long as you have some software that monitors the temperature of your graphics card and will alert you if the temp should rise too high I don't think you have reason to be concerned about the overclocking as far as your hardware goes. But it does strike me as a littly shifty that the shop didn't tell you straight up they had overclocked the card to increase its performance.

I think it's very difficult for a small shop to compete with the hardware prices offered by the big electronics chain stores and especially to try to compete with NewEgg, Tiger Direct, and other online retailers. But I think an independent computer shop really doesn't serve its customers well if they overclock hardware on a customer's system without informing the customer of that fact. I don't know, of course, whether or not your shop did that, but if you find that the model of card they installed is not overclocked before leaving the factory that will be a pretty good indication someone at the shop did the overclocking.

Maybe when you return their CD with the overclocking software on it, you should ask if they overclocked your graphics card. If they say they did, then I'd ask them why they didn't tell you that. I'd also ask if boosting the core clock voids the warranty on the graphics card. (Factory overclocking doesn't void the company's warranty of course, but any overclocking done by an installer or user may.)

Why didn't the shop also overclock the system RAM/memory? Often, but not always, overclocking system RAM requires an increase in the voltage supplied to the RAM. This means increased heat and that will shorten the memory's life unless special steps are taken to get rid of the heat. To get rid of the additional heat generated by RAM running at higher than rated voltage either heat spreaders (a special type of heat sink for use with RAM) have to be installed on the RAM, or a fan installed to blow away the heat. That adds a few dollars more to the cost. And increasing RAM voltage, even if additional cooling measures are taken, may void the warranty for the memory.

Finally, the way all the hardware in a system works together is rather complicated. It may be that your new 7300 graphics card, even overclocked, isn't going to "out run" your system RAM running at the RAM's stock voltage/speed. In that case, there wouldn't be anything to gain by overclocking the RAM. That is to say, the 7300 may still be the bottleneck in your system, the slowest main part of your setup that other parts have to wait on. Well, your hard drive is certainly the slowest piece of hardware in your system (and in nearly every system), but when playing a game the hard drive speed typically only becomes a noticeable bottleneck when the game needs to load up a new area or a lot of other data is required by the game for some reason. In second-to-second play usually the CPU, graphics card, or RAM speed are more likely to be the bottleneck that determines the performance limit of your system.

Imagine a group of workers all of whom perform a particular operation involved in assembling a piece of equipment. One of them happens to work noticeably slower than the others. Because of the way the factory is set up the none of the workers can begin to assemble the next piece of equipment until the piece they've been working on is completely finished. And that means that they're always waiting on the slowest worker. Furthermore, imagine that one of the workers, the slowest of all of them, has to put each finished piece of equipment on a shipping pallet. But every so often, after the shipping pallet is full, he has to jump in a forklift and move the full pallet over to a shipping area, then get a new pallet and move it into the production area so that he has another pallet ready as more parts are finished. This is a very long delay compared to any of the delays caused by the slowest worker who's actually working on the part but, fortunately, the pallet delay doesn't occur for each piece produced, it only happens when a pallet is full and must be replaced.

In my analogy, the slowest production worker actually working on the product might be Mr. CPU, or Ms. Graphics card, or Joe RAM. And the fellow who's filling up the pallet and moving it when it's full and replacing it with another would, of course, be Mr. Hard Drive who works, well, hard, but just can't help causing a delay in the whole process by virtue of what he is required to do and because of the nature of the way the job is set up.

Whether you would actually be likely to gain anything by overclocking your RAM might best be a topic for another thread though. And, in any case, I'll leave that up to people here who are more knowledgeable about overclocking and system bottlenecks than I am.

By the way, how much RAM in the 7300? Does it also have 512 MB's as your old card did?

 

7300 GT is what I now have in:

* Graphics Bus: PCI Express
* Memory Interface: 128-bit
* Memory Bandwidth: 10.7 GB/s
* Fill Rate: 2.8 billion pixel/s
* Vertice/s: 350 million
* Memory Type: GDDR3 or DDR-II


This is the AGP card I had in with my old MB:

7600 GS agp

* Core Clock Speed: 400 MHz core frequency
* Memory Clock Speed: 400 MHz (800 MHz effective)
* Memory Interface: 128-bit
* Memory Bandwidth: 12.8 GB/s
* Fill Rate: 3.2 billion pixel/s and 4.8 billion texel/s
* Vertice/s: 500 million
* SLI support (Only for the PCIe version)
* Cooling Solution: Passively cooled (Nvidia reference)
* Memory Type: GDDR3 or DDR-2


This is what they initially put in with my new PCI Mainboard:

7100 GS

* Graphics Bus: PCI Express
* Memory Interface: 64-bit
* Memory Bandwidth: 5.3 GB/s
* Fill Rate: 1.4 billion pixel/s
* Vertice/s: 263 million
* Memory Type: DDR-II with TC

I'm already wanting to go out and buy an 8600 GT.