agp not enabled?

freddy

New Member
Hello

According to everest home edition agp on my computer is not enabled, although my graphics card is a agp card which is installed in the agp slot in my motherboard and works fine. Could it mean that high speed agp is not enabled. My motherboard is a via p4x400 and my graphics card is a geforce fx 5500. Anyone got any ideas how to enable it or what is meant by it?
 
if the agp port is running in pci mode will it effect the graphics card performance?. How do i find what drivers i have installed for my motherboard?
 
If you have an AGP slot it can still be disabled, my agp slot used to be disabled you gotta go into bios and find something about agp in there, what bios do you have?
 
i have the same bios but i have an older version, ok so in my bios after pressing del to enter bios i went to 'Chipset Features Setup' i beleive in v6PG its named 'Advanced Chipset Features', after selecting that look for 'AGP Aperture size (MB)' there should be a number if there isnt change it to a number which is half the size of your RAM then save settings then try your AGP video card again.
 
if the agp port is running in pci mode will it effect the graphics card performance?. How do i find what drivers i have installed for my motherboard?

Your AGP slot can't run in PCI mode, that's why there are seperate AGP and PCI + PCI+E slots. As mentioned before, either one or the other will be enabled, which would require a simple turning off of one of the slots depending on which one you want enabled. Are you able to play games ok? I.e. can you play on the games that your graphics card is recommended for (games with a specification requirement equal or lower to that of your graphics spec). Maybe the program is reading wrong? Which would be rather strange. Best bet would be to double check you are running the latest motherboard chipset drivers (usually there is a utility installed along with them or something to tell you, also try checking the device manager etc?).

Quick question, if you had AGP disabled and PCI-E (for example) enabled when you are in fact running an AGP graphics card, surely the card wouldn't display any picture past POST? What with it not being enabled and all?
 
Last edited:
Games do work but sometimes i might expect the game to perform better, but that could be just because the card isnt very good. What would i look for in the device manager, I have no utilities for the motherboard. Some devices under system devices say that they have no drivers intalled, and say that the driver provider is microsoft.
 
Your AGP slot can't run in PCI mode

Yes it can, the AGP port runs off the PCI bus, all AGP ports run in PCI mode untill you install the chipset AGP driver, it runs off the 32bit PCI bus


Instead, what the manufacturers have done is gotten a little creative with their AGP interfaces and are actually running the slot off of the PCI bus, stemming from the South Bridge. Remember that the AGP interface is only 32-bits wide, the same width as the PCI bus and you can actually run an AGP card in PCI mode, giving up all of the benefits of AGP obviously. Remember that the PCI bus runs at 33MHz, offering only 133MB/s of bandwidth vs. AGP 8X's 2.1GB/s of bandwidth to the card. The incredible drop in bandwidth explains the performance hit,

Basically AGP is a variant of PCI, so all the controllers operating on AGP interface have all the capabilities of PCI devices. Both interfaces are 32 bits wide and most of signals are the same. PCI has many slots, while AGP is a point to point connection. PCI works at 33 MHz, AGP at 66 MHz. AGP interface may perform two kinds of transactions: PCI transactions and AGP transactions. The only AGP transactions are "bus mastering" transfers from system memory to the graphics controller initiated by the graphics controller. All the other transactions are performed as PCI transfers. Even then, these transactions are twice faster than the transactions on PCI bus due to the higher clock speed of AGP interface. Some old AGP-based cards can perform only PCI-style transactions
 
Games do work but sometimes i might expect the game to perform better, but that could be just because the card isnt very good. What would i look for in the device manager, I have no utilities for the motherboard. Some devices under system devices say that they have no drivers intalled, and say that the driver provider is microsoft.

These are your boards chipset with AGP drivers
http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageID=420&OSID=1&CatID=1070

If this is that SOYO board this is the rest of the boards drivers
P4X400 ultra
http://www.soyousa.com/downloads/selectresults.php?language=&col3=Driver&col2=159

P4X400 Lite
http://www.soyousa.com/downloads/selectresults.php?language=&col3=Driver&col2=187
 
my board is made by jetway, would it be better to download the drivers from them?
http://download.jetway.com.tw/download.asp?sorder=Name&sword=P4X400DA

Do you think that installing the drivers will improve performance in games. At the moment when playing halo i have to put the screen resolution down to 640x480 and have all the settings on medium or low to get a fps rate that is playable. This is still only around 30 fps, would you have thought that the frame rate should be higher with my card?
 
Yes it can, the AGP port runs off the PCI bus, all AGP ports run in PCI mode untill you install the chipset AGP driver, it runs off the 32bit PCI bus


Instead, what the manufacturers have done is gotten a little creative with their AGP interfaces and are actually running the slot off of the PCI bus, stemming from the South Bridge. Remember that the AGP interface is only 32-bits wide, the same width as the PCI bus and you can actually run an AGP card in PCI mode, giving up all of the benefits of AGP obviously. Remember that the PCI bus runs at 33MHz, offering only 133MB/s of bandwidth vs. AGP 8X's 2.1GB/s of bandwidth to the card. The incredible drop in bandwidth explains the performance hit,

Basically AGP is a variant of PCI, so all the controllers operating on AGP interface have all the capabilities of PCI devices. Both interfaces are 32 bits wide and most of signals are the same. PCI has many slots, while AGP is a point to point connection. PCI works at 33 MHz, AGP at 66 MHz. AGP interface may perform two kinds of transactions: PCI transactions and AGP transactions. The only AGP transactions are "bus mastering" transfers from system memory to the graphics controller initiated by the graphics controller. All the other transactions are performed as PCI transfers. Even then, these transactions are twice faster than the transactions on PCI bus due to the higher clock speed of AGP interface. Some old AGP-based cards can perform only PCI-style transactions

You learn something new everyday :). Many thanks for the correction and info.
 
i have the same bios but i have an older version, ok so in my bios after pressing del to enter bios i went to 'Chipset Features Setup' i beleive in v6PG its named 'Advanced Chipset Features', after selecting that look for 'AGP Aperture size (MB)' there should be a number if there isnt change it to a number which is half the size of your RAM then save settings then try your AGP video card again.

changing the aperture size won't enable/disable agp functionality. it just tells your system how much ram to use for video memory once your video card's memory has been saturated.
 
i have seen no performance increase after I have installed the drivers, does this show that agp was enabled before i installed the drivers?
 
Back
Top