Notches on video cards?

D

Dra

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 4, 2004
Messages
196
While browsing through the "show off your vid card" thread i noticed that nvidia-based cards had 3 notches where the gold contacts are and ati-based cards had 2 notches. why is this? is it so that they will not fit into certain slots or it's just the way they were made?



2 notches

3 notches
 
woops my mistake both nvidia-based cards and radeon cards have either 2 or 3 notches. but i'd still like to know what they're for....
 
they both fit in the agp slot just the same... i noticed that but never cared so long as it works either way :)

its probably just engineers preference / design of the cards architecture. maybe one way is cheaper and easier to design. maybe the other way is more expensive but is more durable. i have NFI. :cool:
 
It depends on the chipsets that both NVIDIA and ATI use. Most of the ATI Radeon 9800XT and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra and 5950 Ultra cards have just 2 notches. Most older 4X AGP cards, GFFX's up to a 5900nu and Radeons up to some of the 9800 Pros have three notches. The ones with only two notches will not fit the older 2x AGP slots (such as those found in 440BX chipset-based motherboards) at all; the ones with three notches will (but there's no guarantee that the faster cards will work properly or at all on such older slots - in fact, the higher AGP voltage of older slots may burn out some of the newer cards or cause further stability problems in Windows).
 
i have an AGP 2.0 slot, will the cards with 2 notches fit in it?
 
Originally posted by Dra
i have an AGP 2.0 slot, will the cards with 2 notches fit in it?
Click to expand...

In this case, AGP 2.0 is 4x AGP. And yes, the ones with two notches will fit. The only AGP slots that the two-notch extreme high-end cards will not fit into are those that are only AGP 1.0 (2x AGP).
 
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