Tuesday 18 December 2012

AGP Cards


Most graphic cards produced from about 1998-2004 were AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) cards. They are placed in a certain slot on the mainboard with an extra high data transfer rate. The interface was invented to keep the graphics card away from the PCI bus, which was starting to become too constrained for modern graphics cards.
Every graphic card carries a graphic chip (GPU) and very fast DDR RAM for textures and 3D data. Their data buses have 1X, 2X, 4X, and 8X speeds. The bus is 32-bit, much like PCI.
AGP slots are slightly shorter than PCI slots and often brown in color. A similar type of slot called AGP Pro is longer and has extra power leads to accommodate modern video cards. It didn't really catch on in the mainstream market, and graphics card makers preferred to add an extra power connector to supply the power they needed.

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