How can I find/change agp speed?

[eyes 0]

I was reading through another thread and someone suggested using wcpuid to find the agp speed.

Curious, I downloaded it and ran it then looked in the chipset section and I think I may be running at 1x instead of 4x

(sorry about the colours in the following pics but I couldnt be bothered to load photoshop to save in jpg so I used paint and saved in gif)

So am I right in thinking I'm only running at 1x agp?

How can I change it, I have nvmax installed and agp speed is currently on auto - can I just change this?

Cheers

[Placebo 29]

You change the AGP speed (for most motherboards) in the bios, you access that by pressing the "delete" key when you've rebooted your machine and are at the screen where you see your ram being "counted", careful what you change in there though, you can mess things up, just change your AGP speed unless you're 100% sure what other stuff you're changing.

[Mister Frag 0]

You should be able to set it in the BIOS, but if you already have NVMAX, you can change it there, too -- that will override the BIOS setting once Windows loads.

[eyes 0]

I don't remember seeing any agp speed setting otherwise I'm sure I'd have already set it to 4x as I've gone through the bios a couple of times tweaking things.

Any other thoughts?

[eyes 0]

also why does it say fast writes not supported? I'm sure they are on my mobo.

[tlx 0]

Eyes, in the left column it states the available rates and in the right the selected one. You're GeForce 2 MX should be able to handle 2x and 4x with no problem. I found out on my chipset (i815) that using larger AGP windows would do no good so i set it to the same size as my video-ram. It runs smooth when matched but has glitches with larger AGP windows. Also the AGP bus i very prone to overclocking because most boards use a fixed FSB ratio to clock AGP. Your clock rate seems to be standard though. Sideband adressing/fast writes is activated by the BIOS if supported by the AGP slot often, but is said to cause problems often. Try the AGP window.

[eyes 0]

Yeah I checked the bios and 4x is selected for agp and fast writes is enabled.

I can't believe it really is running at 1x agp 'cos I get a score of around 2200 in 3dmark2001 and while this is about 300 below average for my setup I'm sure it would be a lot lower if I was running at 1x agp.

[tlx 0]

I get about 3.200 with a PIII@834 and a GF2 GTS compared to your 1gig CPU. Did you test that AGP aperture size stuff?

[eyes 0]

no I haven't tried a smaller aperature - I thought this was more relevent to your main memory than you graphics card memory. As I have 512 main memory I felt 128mb aperature size was fine. I'll give a 32mb aperature a try next time I have 3dmark operational, at the moment I've let my system go a bit to pot as I've basically been waiting for some free time to install win xp pro and when I installed dx8.1 it messed up my registry (which there isn't much you can do about).

I should hopefully have time to format, partition (I'm gonna have a unix running too), and install win xp on monday (tommorow). So I'll be curious to know what score I get in that and I'll give a 32mb aperature a try then.

I've always felt 2200 is a bit of a low score with my system but when i do the compare with my graphics card I have about the same score as other athlon owners with geforce2 mx's. I guess the geforce2 mx is the weakest part of my system.

As it stands if I have 4x selected in bios and agp speed set to auto using nvmax, surely it is running at 4x?

Could the low 3dmark score be to do with the fact I installed the via 4in1 NOT in turbo mode?

[tlx 0]

Just try. I saw it glitch on "Dragothic" and "Lobby" with a high size since they make heavy use of textures. Works flawlessly with 32 MB set but may vary on different chipsets. I think the WCPUID stats are accurate however.

Don't know what u mean by "Turbo mode"? Only know this from some Bioses for sharper RAM timings.

[eyes 0]

I take it you don't use the via 4 in 1 drivers.  When you install them you can choose normal or turbo. Turbo is faster but it warns that it may be unstable.

When you say WCPUID is accurate are you saying you think I am running at 1x agp?

I'm not so sure about some of what it says: Fast Writes are in my bois and enabled so how can it say not supported?

Is there some other util that plainly says what agp speed I'm running at?

Cheers

[R. Gerschwarzenge 0]

SiSoft Sandra is a handy program if you want to analyze your computer. Download the proggie, go to 'Mainboard Information' and look for 'AGP Bus, Current Data Transfer Rate'.

[tlx 0]

Yes i think WCPUID is right on AGP there. You might give Sandra a try as supposed by R. Gerschwarzenge or try RivaTuner it also shows the current AGP rate.