October 2004
Intermediate to advanced
304 pages
7h 44m
English
Content preview from PC Hacks
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Hack #68. Get off the PCI Bus
If your PC lacks an AGP port, you are stuck with PCI. You may find a PCI video adapter (see Figure 7-1) with more video RAM and higher performance than the card you have now, but that's about as far as you can go with PCI. If you have an AGP bus connector on your system board, by all means get down to the computer store and pick up a late model nVidia GeForce or ATI Radeon card to get that well-deserved, long-awaited performance boost. An AGP video adapter can perform 15 times faster than a PCI adapter. It may not improve your game skills, but you'll better enjoy the playing you do.
Figure 7-1. A typical PCI-bus VGA adapter
Before you simply grab the latest AGP card and plug it into your system, you need to know which level of AGP performance and what voltage your system board's AGP I/O slot supports. Specifically, will the slot support something better than the original AGP 1x cards? Will it take an AGP 2x, 4x, or 8x card? AGP 8x cards are not backwards compatible, so an AGP 8x card will not run in an AGP 1x, 2x, or 4x slot; the slower slots do not have the proper clocking or voltage to run an 8x card. Plugging an AGP 2x card into a 1x slot will not give you the 2x performance increase you may be expecting; the slot does not provide the higher clock speed for 2x, and similarly a 4x card will not run as fast as it can in a 2x slot.
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.