8x AGP for Dual Processing Systems? 32
Paul E. Loeb asks: "I am wondering if there are any solutions out there that will allow the use of an 8x AGP bus with dual processing support. I prefer AMD Athlon MP, but Xeon would be fine as well. I am looking to build a high-end graphics and video editing system, and I don't want to submit to a single Intel or AMD processor. I do however wish to use a Radeon 9700 or GeForce FX, but that would be pretty pointless at a 4x bus. Thank you in advance for all of your advice."
4x is fine (Score:1, Insightful)
Honestly, I don't see why you would need a 8x AGP card. Nothing except 3D games take advantage of it. I'd stick to a fast, single CPU system if you insist on 8X agp. Right now the dual chipsets are flakey.
Re:4x is fine (Score:1)
Re:4x is fine (Score:2)
That being said, 3D content creation wouldn't be limited to the card would it?
In the case of raytracing, modeling 3D animation like Pixar, or other similar work...isn't that processor bound? They do everything in memory, then output a single 2d frame. Then repeat for the next frame. Once all the frames have been rendered, then they add them together to make the movie.
For video editing...that would always be in 2D.
Wouldn't the only thing that a 3D card be useful for is real time displaying of 3D enviroments?
Not Just 3D *GAMES* use 3D (Score:2)
8X is a marketing feature (Score:3, Informative)
Not according to most benchmarks I've seen. The AGP speed mainly comes into play when the VRAM can't hold all the textures, and the card has to go to main memory. When that happens, performance will suck no matter the AGP speed, but that should be very rare with the 128MB either of those cards would pack. 8x makes a negligible difference in benchmarks of current PC games. In other words, don't make AGP 8x a sticking point in a system that meets all your other needs.
Re:8X is a marketing feature (Score:5, Informative)
Re:8X is a marketing feature (Score:2)
who's the putz, again?
Re:8X is a marketing feature (Score:1)
Surprisingly enough, this is not as true as it used to be, according to this super interesting paper [uni-erlangen.de]. Basically, they found that a plain old Athlon with a GeForce3 performed and looked better than a $100k SGI, in some cases, by huge margins.
(Granted, the paper concerns realtime volumetric rendering of medical imaging (i.e. turning 2D brain scans into 3D models), and not video editing or traditional 3D modeling, but in either case, bandwidth is the key limiting factor.)
Re:8X is a marketing feature (Score:1)
Why?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why?? (Score:1)
Re:Why?? (Score:1)
No, he said "and I don't want to submit to a single Intel or AMD processor"...
I read this is saying he doesn't want to be at the mercy of a single processor, and e.g. drop a frame when he is editing video
Re:Why?? (Score:2)
No luck yet for AMD-based solutions (Score:2, Informative)
This is largely due to the fact that as of late last year, Intel multiprocessing solutions have become cheaper than their AMD counterparts. Intel has reduced lower-end Xeon pricing as faster Xeons have come out. AMD has not done the same with Athlon MP prices. And so Tyan, MSI, Asus et al. are not spending much time thinking about how to keep their Athlon MP motherboard line up to date.
This is just a guess, but it might also have something to do with some bad blood between AMD and manufacturers: the most recent AMD chipset for dual Athlon MP's (760MPX-based) had a bug in the Southbridge that completely disabled on-board USB 1.1 (oops) and it took AMD a while to get a fix into production motherboards. That probably didn't earn them big points.
Instead of AGP 8X... (Score:4, Interesting)
Or better yet get one of these babies [boxxtech.com]!
Newer Dual Xeon's have AGP 8X (Score:2, Interesting)
Right now, you will not see much, if any, difference in performance between AGP 4X and AGP 8X...
Re:Newer Dual Xeon's have AGP 8X (Score:4, Insightful)
also, is it me or is anyone else pissed that since the introduction of the P4 intel has stopped dualie support on their desktop line? i still have fond memories of my dual-hacked-celeron/300a++ setup. anyone remember the 440BX? damn that thing lasted for years, now we seem to get a new chipset every few months...
speaking of which, what's up with AMD & their dual proc story. is just one MP chipset in 2 years enough? i think not...
Re:Newer Dual Xeon's have AGP 8X (Score:1)
The problem with the current Athlons is the fact that both processors get the full FSB bandwidth, but are limited by a single-channel DDR memory controller. That should change with the Athlon 64/Opteron processors... but that's still a bit down the road.
Re:Newer Dual Xeon's have AGP 8X (Score:2)
Here is what I did (Score:1)
Reflash BIOS and OC it to 337Core and 310RAM, that's a little better than a 9700 pro stock.
IWILL Athalon MPX Board, throw a fan on the northbridge and it OCd to 147(294DDR) FSB
Get 2 Athalon 2400s With the FSB OC you're running them at 2.2 GHz each. Get some conductive paint and connect the L5 bridge to turn them into athalon MPs.
2x512MB Cas2 Registered RAM
stress test, stress test, stress test. Mine is happy and stable at these speeds. YMMV!
I'm very happy with this setup and it didn't cost a fortune either.
A UV Blacklight, 2 Glowing CPU fans, and 4 UV sensitive IDE cables with a case window round it all out nicely.
Relax, and encode a Divx movie in under 2 hrs:)
Re:Here is what I did (Score:1)
Re:Here is what I did (Score:1)
http://www.hardwarez one.com/articles/articles.hwz?cid=2&aid=393&page=
video editing - gfx card not important (Score:2)
better money spent than in your fancy smancy gfx card
for under $1000 you can get full broadcast quality non-linear editing with full resulution capture
and you can use a $10 Trident 8900C VGA card
Mine's over 10 years old and will work just fine on my Pentium 90. If you want to add effects then a bit moor oomph wouldn't go amiss.
Serious graphics vs. Gamer / Gamer-like graphics (Score:4, Insightful)
Look, if you want an SMP gaming box, this question should be automatically relegated to
I've had the pleasure of using high end Sun and SGI workstations here and there. While they may not have the fill rate of their gaming friends, they have many, many "work smart, not hard" accelerations available to them that matter in the professional circuit. I would think that any serious graphics capabilities would be best served by an SGI box, and believe me, they don't get AGP So, if you are into MCAD/MCAE, Digital Mockup (DMU) , 3D Animation, Medical Imaging, Scientific Visualization, Oil and Gas (seismic interpretation), Visual Simulation, Editing and Compositing and Geospatial Imaging, you probably aren't the type to need to ask Slashdot where to buy a PC for any of these applications, many of which don't even run on PC architecture. It was a very recent thing where PC cards could even be competitive with professional cards in terms of brute forcing past the elegant hardware accelerations available to professional cards. No one with a professional 3d card on a real workstation feels bad because their metrics don't include Mad Onion/Future Mark 3DMark 2009 XP White Zinfandel Platinum Edition Build 1048576.
You need a dual gaming-only box Why? Why? Just get a single p4-3.06 HT and a Radeon 9700. Believe my, even if it doesn't have AGP 8x, its going to make no more than 5% difference. And who the hell cares about 5% when frame rates are coming out at two times the monitors refresh rate? Who cares?
If you are not a pure gamer, but do other things that fit the gamer archetype like ripping DIVX, then you probably want a fast integer rig for consumer operating systems like Windows XP, then get a Dual 2.8GHz Xeon with an ATI or Nvidia or even a Matrox Parhelia (a popular "professional" card due to 3 heads). Most of the professional PC cards require AGP Pro 110, so that's the slot you would be looking for, Pro 110 is a far more important consideration than AGP 8x. (110 being the watts that the slot can dish out).
I think this is a consumer grade Photoshop / Premiere / Lightwave / Bryce / QuickTime / DiVX / MPEG box. That is the "gamer" category as far as I'm concerned, and for any of those applications, AGP 8x makes no difference.
Don't be looking for Raytheon to start using junk PCs in simulations for any of the military grade stuff they design, it just isn't happening. Microsoft = consumer grade, Nvidia = consumer grade. Just because the really high end stuff is priced beyond the reach of consumers doesn't mean its junk.
agp 8x mainboard... (Score:3, Informative)
I would expect in most application benchmarks you'll see the difference in benchmarks of agp 4x and 8x being vanishingly close to zero at this time but yuor mileage may vary, especially if you're a doom3 developer... ;)
Anyway supermicro makes such a board, the super X5DAL-TG which also has serial ata and gigabit ethernet so it's probably a niceish board even if it's outside my price range...