Patent Application
20060069834
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to a method for supplying an AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) card on a PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus slot, especially to a layout of the PCI bus arranged to a layout with an AGP bus.
2. Description of Related Art
Buses in prior art industry computers are classified into ISA (Industry Standard Architecture), VISA (Virtual Instrument Software Architecture), PCI, AGP, and so on. Moreover, a plurality of slots is set on a motherboard and interface cards are plugged into corresponding slots. The interface cards are connecting devices between the peripheral apparatuses, and the peripheral apparatuses are controlled by the motherboard through the interface cards. Further, ISA slots in early days were developed to VISA slots, and the VISA slots are then developed to PCI slots. Now, the PCI slots are further developed to AGP slots.
Nowadays, technologies are greatly improved, but still some ISA slots and PCI slots are set together on old motherboards. Therefore, when ISA slots are all plugged with ISA interface cards, another ISA interface card is impossible to be plugged into any slot on the mother board, and it is the same case with the PCI slots. An interface card with two kinds of interfaces and it can be plugged to any PCI or ISA slots on the motherboard. The slot interfaces are not restricted to specific cards and therefore, the cost is lowered.
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However, an AGP interface card can not be plugged into a motherboard with all PCI slots, because of no AGP slot is on the motherboard. Therefore, a new motherboard with AGP slots is needed.
The present invention provides a method for supplying an AGP card on a PCI bus slot and resolves drawbacks of prior art motherboards.
The method of the present invention provides: transmitting a detecting signal to a motherboard, scanning status of a plurality of PCI bus slots on the motherboard, and out-connecting an AGP card for displaying.
To provide a further understanding of the invention, the following detailed description illustrates embodiments and examples of the invention, this detailed description being provided only for illustration of the invention.
Generally, displaying functions are provided by three different ways. First, the AGP displaying functions are provided by chips on the motherboard with built-in displaying functions and built-in displaying functions are usually utilized by portable computers for official purposes. Second, an AGP card is needed for playing computer games with fine and smooth displaying, and the AGP card is plugged into an AGP slot. Moreover, built-in displaying functions of the chips are insufficient for playing computer games. Third, the present invention provides a method for setting an AGP card on a PCI bus slot. Therefore, users can choose displaying functions provided by an out-connected AGP card or by built-in displaying functions when an AGP is not provided.
A motherboard with lower price has only PCI slots and chips with built-in displaying functions. Hence, an AGP card can be plugged into a PCI slot by putting PCI signals on AGP signals. The defined bandwidth of PCI signals is narrower than AGP signals, but pins for receiving AGP and PCI signals are the same. Moreover, AGP has better performance than the PCI and pins on the slot of AGP and PCI bus are not the same.
Prior art motherboard uses different interface cards for different functions, but present invention arranges a layout with PCI slots to a layout with an AGP slot. Therefore, signals of PCI bus is transformed to signals of AGP bus and then the AGP card can be plugged on the PCI slot of the motherboard.
There has thus been described a new, novel and heretofore unobvious PCI bus which eliminates the aforesaid problem in the prior art. Furthermore, those skilled in the art will readily appreciate that the above description is only illustrative of specific embodiments and examples of the invention. The invention should therefore cover various modifications and variations made to the herein-described structure and operations of the invention, provided the fall within the scope of the invention as defined in the following appended claims.
