Simviation Forums

I am using an ATI Radeon 9600XT made by Visiontek , and I'm looking to upgrade my motherboard in order to utilize the 8X speed of the card. (currently running at 4X, which is the fastest speed supported by my current motherboard.)

So, I have three questions.

First, I see a lot of boards that say the have an 8X AGP slot, but only at 1.5v. Others I see, say that they are 8X AGP 3.0 compliant. Still others say that they support 4X at 1.5v, and 8X at 0.8v.

Now this is what Visiontek has to say about my card..."AGP 2X (3.3v), 4X (1.5V), 8X (0.8v) or Universal AGP 3.0 bus configuration (2X/4X/8X). "

Since this video card seems to use 0.8v at 8X speed, does that mean I can't use it in a board that has an 8X agp slot that only works at 1.5v?

The second question would be how much of a difference could I see by switching from 4X to 8X? (It might seem obvious, as I would assume the video performance should double.....but I know how to spell A.S.S.U.M.E!)

And third, Right now, I'm getting a score of 8100+ with 3Dmark2001se. If I found a board with the same CPU, FSB, and ram speed and timings (though I HOPE I can do better than that) how much of an impact would that make on the benchmark score?

Well I am not 100% sure on your AGP deal I know AGP 3.0 can do either one. I have never heard of needing to match up the AGP voltages though. This leads me on to your next question unfortunatly your performance wont just double. In all reality AGP 8x is not much faster than AGP 4x and to upgrade your motherboard for that IMO would be an utter waste of money.

I don't know your spects but knowing your running AGP means your system is getting quite old in tech. Upgrading the cpu/ram etc for that motherboard would boost your scores but not enough to really justify it I don't think. What you are looking at here IMO is a whole new system. A new system can be had for relatively cheap and even a mid range system im sure will blow the socks off the thing your using now. Please post your specs so they can further help you.

There is only so much a tech generation can deliver, if your running an AMD Socket 754, hey it was a great generation. We saw the introduction to mainstream 64 bit computing there but unlike today it only has one core and a slower architecture.

Thanks for the hit-back Gunner. I know my system is a dinosaur, and I'm looking to upgrade all of it. In fact, I'm scouting EBay as we speak.

My current specs are as follows:
MSI K7T turbo @ 133MHz FSB (266MHz effective clock)
756MB PC133
AMD Athlon 1800+@1.5 GHz (socket A)

The system I'm looking for would be something in the neighborhood of:
2.2GHz+ cpu
512MB+ DDR
on a board with an 8X AGP slot, just because I'm not ready to give up on my vid card yet.
(on a very limited budget)

It's not a terrible system to use FS9 on (which is all I use it for anyway) but I've taken it as far as it can go, and it's time to move on.

Moving on has commenced! Just picked up an MSI Neo-FSR with a P4 @ 3.0ghz with 2GB Kingston ram. Should do FS9 nicely, no?

Yup, should run FS9 pretty well.  8-)