Why dont mobos come with 2 AGP slots?

[05virulosity50]

??? That way you can have a 9800xt for halflife 2 and a 5950 Ultra for Doom3.

just a thought.

 

[Bensa]

Because you would have to have hardware controller to switch between. You would need to have 2 sets of conflicting drivers, and only a few would be sold since most (read: 99.99999%) of people do not need two video cards.

 

[a12bc3]

They have vid cards with 2 DVI ports for 2 monitors =)
Hope I helped.

 

[Gnufsh]

AGP is a point-to point bus, that means that there can only be one AGP card on the BUS. I think it would be too complicated to put two seperate AGP busses on a board. It would, at the least, require going to 6-layer PCBs. It would also probably cause many other problems that would have to be worked out (sharing DMA memory channels, what controls the cards, os support, which bus to init first, etc).

 

[Master Mitch]

I set up a system with two video cards just for the heck of it once. Naturally, one was PCI, but the drivers didn't get in a huff.

Motherboard chipsets only have one AGP bus. It would probably be possible to transmute a 66 MHz PCI bus into an AGP (Intel performed the opposite conversion on some 44GX server boards), but I'd expect unacceptable latency.

I can't see any particular reason why an Opteron board couldn't be built with two AMD 7151 AGP controllers (or equivalent)-- indeed, I've been expecting to see exactly that for graphical workstations. Which isn't a guarantee by a long shot. =)

 

[JCLW]

In theory the Serverworks GC boards could be built with two AGP bridges.

Anyways soon everything will be PCI express and you'll be able to use (again in theory) as many video cards as you have PCI slots.



- JW

 

[Fast420A]

What about a Dually with 2 AGPs? Possible?

 

[JCLW]

The Serverworks boards are dually or quad.



- JW

 

[Foxie3a]

I'm sure they can, but it would require new chipsets. You would need two AGP busses, which is the hardest. And they just are too lazy!

 

[Noodles]

Dual CPUs are still used largely for servers. Servers don't even need one AGP bus if used for there intended purpose, let alone two. Doesn't seem likely that you'd see a server board with 2 AGP buses.