I have a new mobo and it supports AGP Pro, what is it and why is there a molex power socket next to the AGP port?? Thanks
You are highly unlikely to require AGP Pro in general use as it is mainly for high end commercial 3D cards. The molex is there probably as they tend to draw a lot of power and often need their own supply.
AGP pro cards can often intrude into PCI slots also. It doesn't really cost manufacturers any extra to incorporate AGP Pro, and it works very well as naive people go "ooohhhh....AGP Pro, need", when they've never actually seen or lusted after an AGP Pro card. Basically, unless you're in the market for a professional CAD card, such as a Wildcat, Oxygen or Fire then AGP Pro is useless to you.
And Oh boy would they cost you if you do want one! The Wildcat can cost well over £1000, so not really part of the market for us mere mortals!
Right, and since you'd also have dual or quad CPUs for such tasks, putting AGP Pro onto retail market single CPUs is one of the most pointless "features" imaginable...
Not necessarily, AGP Pro provides 110 watts to the gfx card, AGP I think 30 (maybe 50?). How much power do you think ATI R300/400/500 and Nvidia NV30/35/40 are going to take? They're going to be power hungry cards! I quite like the look of the NVidia 900XGL, excellent games performance and fantastic display quality.
Since die sizes on graphics cards are ever decreasing, actually the power consumption doesn't increase as rapidly as one might expect. For example, Geforce 256 had a well known heat problem, and dissipated 16W at standard clock speed (125MHz or whatever it was). Geforce 2 GTS dissipated only 8W, and yet was considerably more capable than Geforce256. Geforce 2MX dissipated a mere 4W, and yet was equal in performance to the geforce256. 4W meant that the GF2MX didn't even need a heatsink (and my Creative card came without one, and has now been returned to that state since it is no longer being overclocked), let alone a fan. Basically, standard AGP can provide enough power for any single-chip solution that will be out in the next few years. The reason professional CAD cards require so much extra power is that they have several separate processors on them. This is not the case, and will not be the case with mainstream cards (since mainstream cards used to have several processors (eg Voodoo II boards had 3). Also, if a mainstream card does need more power than can be provided through the AGP slot, it will likely carry a molex input, as the big voodoo 5s did, since the manufacturers can not rely on the availability of the AGP Pro slot.
But Nvidia does own the rights to 3dfx's SLI tech, so maybe dual/quad chips on one board are not that unlikely?
Fill rates (which is what SLI helped with) are no longer the limiting factor in graphics speeds really, since present graphics cards already have fill rates far in advance of what we could possibly need really. These days it is hardware features, such as T&L, Pixel Shaders, Anisotropic Filtering, AA, etc that are limiting speeds. Look at matrox Parhelia for example. Straight up against a GF4, the parhelia will be slower at older games such as Q3. However, if you start putting things like AA and Anisotropic filtering on, the matrox will pull ahead, as it does not have anything like the performance drop when using these features in older games. With newer games, more reliant on multi-texturing, vertex shading, etc, the parhelia will be considerably faster than GF4. Trying to split these functions across several chips is very costly, hard to do, etc, and oh look, you've ended up with a wildcat.... AGP Pro has its place. However, I think in the market that readers of this forum are 99.9999% likely to belong to (home, gaming, etc), AGP Pro is a completely unnecessary thing, and should have no impact on choice of a motherboard.
