Kahenraz wrote:

See this picture for an example of a missing AGP slot:
http://www.thg.ru/mainboard/intel_motherboard … nshots_6_1.html

Why would such things be omitted? If I were to solder on a connector would it work?

The missing slot is for a coast cache module, it's not soldered in because the motherboard has the cache chips soldered from the factory.

If there were no cache chips soldered on the board there would be a socket for adding cache using a coast module.

There are motherboards with missing AGP/PCI/ISA slots though, it saves pennies to not solder them in. When you sell 100 000 motherboards pennies matter! 😀

I don't think that this slot is an unpopulated AGP slot as your chipset is made by intel and intel never made socket 7 chipsets with AGP support. This looks more like a unpopulated COAST slot (in fact it's even written on the board) but since they might have maxed out the cache present onboard, there is no reason to put a COAST slot on the board as it won't be useful for anything.

But your question is interesting. Probably to make you buy a more premium product that has just one more slot. Sometimes putting the slot just there will work but sometimes, different components have been removed (capacitors, diodes, resistors ...) and so it won't work at all.

I remember someone who actually took a socket A board with no AGP and that too the AGP slot on a dead board and put it in the board that didn't have the AGP slot and then it worked without any issues