Buying A Motherboard - Your Graphics card

If you are making a machine to run games on, which at some point most people are, then its possible that your graphics card could be one of the most expensive pieces of equipment in your machine. Because of this you really want it to fit into your motherboard. Today graphics cards come in two main forms. the most popular is now an PCI Express graphics card, the other is an older AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port)

AGP cards

AGP cards require that the Motherboard they are in have the correct AGP slot. Most of the motherboards on sale today either come with both AGP and PCI express or do not contain an AGP slot. AGP technology however is not so old that only really old motherboards have them. many graphics cards still come out in AGP format

The next thing to look for if you have an AGP card is the AGP speed that your card requires in order to run. They currently come in AGP 1x, 2x, 4x and 8x. Also if you have one of the newer graphics cards it is worth checking to see if your card requires AGP pro and if so making sure that the motherboard supports it. AGP Pro is a standard set up for the more powerful graphics cards which require different voltages to run than the previous cards. The best types to look for are the Universal AGP Pro slots. These will take all of the AGP pro cards.

PCI Express

PCI Express was brought in to replace the slightly ageing AGP graphics technology. PCI express doesn't hold much of a resemblance to the old PCI bus, mainly because that PCI express is a serial data system and the old PCI bus was a parallel system. The PCI express bus is split into several channels each directly connected to the main chipset. Standard components in a PCI Express system will be PCI express 1x. Graphics cards because they require a much larger bandwidth than most other components use a PCI Express 16x. As you will imagine this provides 16 tims the bandwidth by combining 16 channels for the sole use of the graphics card. PCI Express 16x is the standard for PCI express graphics cards. More on PCI Express

Checking for compatibility

It is difficult to be sure that you r graphics card will be 100% compatible with your motherboard. Some card and motherboard combinations have slight problems and glitches. You may need to download new drivers or compatibility patches from the manufacturers website. The best way to check for major compatibility issues is to check with websites that specifically go in depth in hardware only. Other good sources are news groups and forums. You could try asking the question in the PantherProducts Forum to see if the regulars can help you.

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