I was shopping for a new mainboard this week, so I decided to consult with some friends to find out when the LX chipset was due for release. Being the friends that they are, they told me that I was wise to wait for the week or so required to purchase a board that supports AGP.
I already knew that AGP is a connector specification, a new video standard and a new way of handling graphics on your computer's bus. Its 133MHz speed represents a large increase over the current 33MHz PCI standard. Initially, it will be offered only on computers that use one of the new Intel Pentium II processors.
What I didn't know was that the LX chipset, which is designed for the Pentium II and supports AGP, also supports SDRam and the Ultra DMA33 standard. Why are these things so significant?
Why AGP?
First, AGP will improve the performance of virtually all graphics-intensive applications. Intel sources claim improvements could be as great as 30 percent, but graphics board suppliers, like Diamond Multimedia, estimate an increase of about 15 to 20 percent. Because the technology is scalable, the more video memory and system memory your new computer has, the better its performance.
Scalability means a number of things, but the most important may be this: your software will have direct access to as much system ram as you have on your mainboard. No longer will texture memory for your 3d accelerator be limited to the two or four meg carried by your video card: an AGP board can access your main system memory.
AGP is designed specifically for 3-D rendering; Intel believes this technology is closely tied to the future of desktop computing. AGP is a physical data-transfer pipe that connects the video controller back to memory. It allows your system to dedicate unused system memory and bandwidth to processing graphics.
The AGP bus comes directly out of the core logic chipset. Intel says it has up to 10 times the memory bandwidth of the traditional PCI bus. Although AGP operates at a clock speed of only 66MHz, it sustains most of its operations on the two edges of the clock cycles, where it transfers 4 bytes (32 bits) of data at twice that speed, up to 133MHz.
SD Ram
SD Ram is considerably faster than EDO ram. The performance gain is most noticed on high end systems, but will be even more significant with an AGP based system. When you video card has direct access to system ram , you want that memory to be as fast as possible.
As for Ultra DMA, it seems to ALMOST as fast as SCSI III at a reduced cost. New hard drives supporting the standard have been available for months, and the overall impact on a fast system will be worth the investment. It is commonly recognized that there is little point in having a very fast cpu unless other parts of your system can keep pace.
A typical AGP-enabled system will include a Pentium II processor, a 3GB SCSI or Ultra DMA hard drive, an AGP graphics card with 2MB or 4MB of VRAM and 1024x768 video as its native resolution, 32MB of SDRAM, and up to 1MB of level 2 cache.
Speed at Any Cost?
AGP's cost will depend on the type of system you use. If you buy a new PII equipped desktop you will have a choice to go with AGP. This morning I did a quick search and I found that ASUS and Supermicro are both listing new mainboards using the LX chipset. Price is a little difficult to determine, but it looks like a single processor mainboard without built in SCSI III will go for around $300 US.
If you are in the market for a new AGP based mainboard you might want to consider a board or system from a major vendor like Gateway, Supermicro, ASUS or Micron. You may also want to consider a dual cpu board that will allow you to add a second cpu at a later date. Since Windows NT and WIN98 will merge into one operating system before much longer, the performance gain of multi-threading will soon be a consideration. In fact, Falcon 4 by Spectrum Holobyte has been written to take advantage of dual cpus!
If you purchase a system with an empty AGP connector and decide to move to this technology, you'll need an appropriate add-in card. Vendors such as ATI and Rendition are poised to release AGP boards in September at around $250 US. CombatSim will review a couple of AGP video boards this next month. Btw, it will be at least six months before we will software that will benefit much by AGP.
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Last Updated August 30th, 1997