I have knoppmyth currently installed and running nicely on and old 850 MHz celeron based system. The m/b is old and has AGP 1 on it only (I think, no newer than AGP 2 anyway for sure).

The question is... can I buy a cheap AGP 8x card (like an nvidia fx5200) and use it in the old computer? In other words, are the newer AGP cards backwards compatible with older AGP slots?

An Nvidia 5200 should work fine in that system.

Martian

You probably need to be careful to pick a card that lists compatibility with whatever AGP level (1x, 2x, ...) your motherboard supports.

AGP is fully backward compatible. The only exception might be a few third tier vendors who didn't make their 0.8V AGP cards backward compatible with 1.5V ports.

As only the new and fancy chips are 0.8V and the original poster has a 1.5V slot unless he is looking at $100 plus "gamer oriented" card he won't have any issues. Even then 90%+ of those cards are backward compatible to 1.5V AGP.

Martian

I thought we'd had at least a couple tales of woe on that count, but people do try to run their KM systems on "bargain" hardware ...