That would be awesome!

Imagine guys! A Voodoo 5 5500 @ AGP 4x ! Full performance!!!! New Processors!

..remember the era when pci-e motherboards were a new thing? many people were refusing to upgrade 'cause they would have to get a new graphics card as well.most of motherboard vendors simply ignored this with "screw them,everybody will have to upgrade to pci-e sooner or later",but some were trying to remedy the situation by providing a motherboard that would be able to accept both agp and pci-e cards alike.the ultimate result were the Dual series boards from Asrock,which offered both slots (a full performance agp8x slot and a full pci-e 16 slot) on one board.and for a very nice price,I might add.

but there was one more solution available-it was called an AGR (advanced graphics riser) slot.it was not very popular.why? well,mainly because it was cr@p-basically,they just slapped together two pci-slots and attached an agp connector to them.unsurprisingly,the performance and compatibility suffered terribly.many cards were almost two times slower (when compared to a real agp8x slot),some did not boot at all.lowend cards performed decently,but that didn't really matter much (4fps or 5fps-its all the same).overally,it was a bad idea,and only very few people have found it useful..

but (there is alway a but ),as one of the guys over at 3dfx.cz confirmed,this little joke of an agp slot has one ability that might come in handy-after removing the agp8x key,it can run agp 3.3V cards from 3dfx (v5 5500 fully tested) right out of the box,no tweaking necessary..so,if you happen to see one of these devils on ebay,well,you know what to do

I did,in the third part of my post-I just made long things short.the important part is (as I already said) that v5 5500agp works 100% ok in the mentioned motherboards AGR slot,no need to tweak anything,all you have to do is remove the key from the slot so the card can physically fit in.the rest is not really important (some questions,details about used cpu&overclocking and about previous attempts of running the card in agp8x slots etc)..

I'll post more stuff as soon as it will be available.

Taking advantage that for the moment this specific Voodoo5 AGP card from M14Radu is with me for modding and it already has the 4x/8x key cut onto the PCB as described above, I took the chance to aquire a socket 775 MB from ECS that features along the PCI Express slot also a so called "AGP Express" slot that is basicaly composed of 2 regular PCI slots routed togeter in the for of a keyed AGP 4x/8x. I had the ideea that after the visual inspection of the board and seeing no voltage signaling level shifter chips, that the AGP Express will be only able to provide 3.3V signaling like the PCI, despite the notch key.
Testing the card in the default state gave horrible artefacts on screen, but then I thought that if the AGP Express is basicaly a PCI slot, then I should use a PCI BIOS on the Voodoo5 card. After flashing all worked OK. More testing will be required before conclusion...
Until then - some pics:

Wow :] but, It's fast? I read about this AGP Express and it's propably very slower than a real AGP port.


(sory for my english )

So its an AGP -> PCI Voodoo 5...

Flippin WEIRD!

Guess it wasn't the BIOS but the Voodoo5 card itself used for testing that has problems. It produces serious stability issues even when used plugged into 100% compatible motherboards... I will remove the key notch from the AGP slot of the skt.775 MB and test the setup with a verified 2x 3.3V card. Anyway, I measured the VDDQ on the AGP slot and it is 3.3V as expected, like the agp 2x standard.
Until then, to answer the performance question of the AGP Express compared to regular PCI 33 slot: they are more or less the same, as seen in the pics bellow:

AGP Express:



PCI 33Mhz:



Benchmarcks done in single-chip mode. Will get back to you whith the progress of the project.