Drivers for older ATI cards in Windows 7!

Hi and welcome.

Probably the Vista drivers would work.
99.9999999% sure.
I'd try that before spending money if you are tight at the moment.

I have never heard of such a thing.

Motherboards do not indiscriminately volt. The video card's bios tells the motherboard's bios what voltage to provide, and the motherboard provides it. Unless you tell it otherwise, you're in no danger of having your board over-volt your video card; that's something you can only do if you manually volt the card.

What I have heard of, and have experience with, is running video cards at a higher hz on the agp bus. Nvidia cards can handle a higher hz, up to 70hz, whereas ATI cards have always been problematic if you don't keep them at 66hz.

GarethS10, is there any particular reason why you're choosing the cards you are? Certainly there are more powerful AGP cards than the ones you've selected... and the last time I checked (about a month ago) they were fairly cheap?

The 96/9700's are on par with the Ti 4400/4600; thus, the 5x card you have is a later model. I would have said better, but the 5x line was a dog, as I'm sure you're aware.

It's my understanding that what the Wiki article refers to is signal speed, which is different from the voltage given to the card; essentially, this has no effect on the card itself and is only relevant to the AGP bus. In short, you can't fry your card no matter what AGP version you use. If the card fits, you're safe... right?

The signaling voltage is the voltage used to send data between the AGP card and the AGP motherboard. "1x" means "1 times". 1x is the base AGP speed. 2x is twice as fast as the base speed, 4x is four times as fast, and 8x is eight times as fast. You can download the final AGP 3.0 specification from here. You may also want to look at the AGP 1.0 specification, the AGP 2.0 specification, and the AGP Pro 1.1a specification.

AGP compatibility for sticklers

Unless I'm totally mistaken? Have you ever heard of something like that happening?

Fumz said:

I have never heard of such a thing.

Motherboards do not indiscriminately volt.

Yep fraid so! I've been building PC's since circa 1990!

AGP Nvidia 6200 onwards - you can fry your card as in the old days motherboard manufacturers did not keep to full AGP specs and if your card lines up with a mal-slot > instant fire and smoke!

Other reasons for card-frying from Stormy's wiki link>

It is important to check voltage compatibility as some cards incorrectly have dual notches and some motherboards incorrectly have fully open slots.
Furthermore, some poorly designed older 3.3 V cards incorrectly have the 1.5 V key. Inserting a card into a slot that does not support the correct signaling voltage may cause damage.

Based on that article I linked, which Stormy also linked, the voltage their referring to has to do with agp bus signal speed... ie tranfering data on the bus, and not actual voltage to the card.

Besides, (and this is perhaps the biggest reason you can't fry a card) the cards employ different slots making it impossible to actually fit a 1x agp card into a 4/8x agp slot. There's little chance of frying a card that's sitting on your desk.

The AGP 1.0 specification requires that all implementations support the 1x speed multiplier at 3.3 volts. The 2x multiplier is optional. There's no such thing as a 3.3 volt video card or motherboard which only supports 2x. By default, when the AGP 1.0 machine powers up it selects the fastest speed multiplier supported by both the video card and the motherboard. If they both support 2x then they will run at 2x. Otherwise they run at 1x which is always implemented by all AGP 1.0 video cards and motherboards. There is often an option in the BIOS which allows you to limit the speed to 1x if 2x is not reliable. The AGP 2.0 specification has a similar requirement. 2x and 1x support at 1.5 volts are required and 4x support is optional. The AGP 3.0 specification requires support for 8x. The 3.0 specification isn't as clear as the 1.0 and 2.0 specifications on the subject of requiring the lower multiplier but all AGP 3.0 implementations that I've seen support both 8x and 4x. As a result, you can completely ignore speed multipliers when you're checking for compatibility between an AGP video card and an AGP motherboard. If the video card and motherboard both support the same signaling voltage then there is always at least one common speed multiplier supported by both at that voltage.

Not to mention that you can't find an AGP 1.0 card these days... and even if you could, it would not fit into the board.

**edit**

I'm really not trying to be argumentative... it's just that I've never heard of frying a card this way.

The OP's board is agp 2.0/4x. The card he's running is agp 8x. The two cards he selected are also agp 8x, so I see no reason why we should fill him with fear about frying the card. Am I missing something here?

A typical case study - he's darn lucky his 6200 card didn't match to a wrong key and FRY in an 'unconventional' AGP 2.0 slot!
http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion...hp?t16738.html

Enjoy your little trolling session and convincing yourself for the rest of this thread!