last good 4x card?

[Niku-Sama]

alright i was wonderin what the last decent AGP 4x card was, my memory seems to be crappin out on me and i cant rember that far back for some reason.

the reason i ask is my girl friends...ugh....compaq, is hellatiously slow and alot of it has to do with on board video (dur) but i cant rember what a decent 4x card is, i have a 5900XT but i DO rember something about using a 8x only card in a 4x slot = bad....and i kinda want to use this.

[Enablingwolf]

As long as the board is not one of the older 1x and 2x AGP slots. It should be ok. AGP 2.0/3.0 is can handle 4x and 8x easy. the older AGP had higher voltage I think and makes the newer AGP cards go crazy and not boot. your going to need a .8v slot to use the 5 series card

There is some 4x cards that had odd voltages. Here is the signaling voltage for them.

1x/2x 1.5V or 3.3V
4x 0.8V or 1.5V
8x 0.8V

[Niku-Sama]

she cant have it, unless she gets un grumpy, it has nvidia on board but i dont know if its origonal, 2 series or 4 series...gathering that its a 1.6Ghz Athlon i am guessin its no 4 series but the drivers dont say they give some generic compaw video device or some other crap.

i cant tell from readin the chip because i am having a really hard time seeing.....not good

[Enablingwolf]

The 9600Pro was a nice little card as was the 9800Pro. It would fit in an older machine right nice. Even the 6 series would do right nice. They should be dirt cheap by now. I know my old 4x AGP AMD2400+ board handled this 6600GT ok. Though it was horribly bottlenecked by the CPU/FSB. It did do it's job and display video. I even had my X850XT PE in it too.

If the AGP slot does not have the second key. It will handle 8X cards. It was a built in safety thing. Like how RAM is. You cannot install RAM that is not meant for another platform. The key stops it. So if you dry install, boot the card and test it out. It will let you know if the machine will boot a 8x card. I see no reason why it would not. Then you can hunt for a nice deal for her. Going all the way back to the Vanta cards. Myself, I would not go lower than a TI4200.
:D