10th May 2008

AGP - What doe AGP Mean ?

AGP - Accelerated Graphics Port

An interface developed by Intel which allows a graphics card to access memory directly which along with the wider bandwidth helps improve graphics performance.

AGP has now come to replace a lot of PCI video cards due to its superior performance, most modern motherboards have an AGP slot as standard. Some motherboards come with an AGP graphics card built-in.

You will see AGP cards advertised with different specifications, including throughput (bandwidth), here is a summary of the throughput they refer to:

1X - 266MBps
2X - 533MBps
4X - 1.07GBps
8X - 2.1GBps

Obviously the higher the throughput the better, although nowadays most video cards run at 8X.

For more info on video cards (graphics cards) click here.

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