AGP vs. PCI-E ?

availability of cards.

guess I should rephrase that a little bit... if you are looking at any kind of futureability, PCI-E is the path to go. decent cards come out for this first, and there are more options to choose from. AGP is dying away bit by bit, and newer good cards are becoming scarce. price is not of a concern anymore either, and often times PCI-E beats out the AGP equivalent.

As a format factor goes, video cards still press hard to utilize the PCI-E bus, and suffer little if any penalty on the AGP side. PCI-E is superior, but underutilized as of yet.

PCI-E is generally much more varied as well as cheaper.

so was I.

and a good 25% more costly....or more!

Yeah it's true that some people say AGP isn't a bottleneck, but just google benchmarks of AGP cards and their equivalent PCI-E. For example.

It's not huge, but it's there.

Entirely possible, but I figure the reason as to why its slower is irrelevant. Fact is, it's slower.

read cleeves post.


As far as i can tell, the only advantage PCI-e had till now was cost effeciency and the availability to go crossfire/sli

7800GS by nvidia was supposed to be the last agp card according to most people. But looks like the market for AGP is still not dead, and i doubt its gonna die any time soon.

PCIe offers other things than bandwidth... it carries alot more power than the AGP bus.

I don't see a performance difference with current cards, but that doesn't mean it's useless. progress isn't a bad thing.

But the bandwidth ceiling is raised meaning that the limit of the bandwidth won't be reached for much longer (better to increase the limit BEFORE you reach it yes?) and PCI-e gives more power meaning less extra power cables needed, AND PCI-e allows for multiple video cards, AND PCI-e will eventually allow for everything in the mobo to be run on one bus (once we get rid of PCI). It is true that the bandwidth bump doesn't really give an advantage to consumers NOW, but PCI-e definitely is a good thing.

p.s. I never said or meant to imply that pci-e was useless, I just was pointing out that in my flawed opinion that it was more marketing than usefulness.

thats a good all purpose card and fairly cheap

enjoy

thinking more on the lines PCI-e is not just for video cards as thay are norm 8x or 16x slots but there are 1x/2x slots as well for other devices that can mae use of the bandwith as well (network cards/Sata stuff)

PCI is an shared bus PCI-e has its only link for each slot PCI-e bandwith is alot biger then PCI as well (guessing here) 100MB/s vs PCI-e 1x is 256MB/s [512MB/s both ways] and that goes all the way to 16x (1x 2x 4x 8x 16x)

any way think its not an matter should i be thinking of AGP any more as its more or so dead for new video cards and point lesss for some one buying an new video card now and wanting to upgrade later on to an better one as ATI/AMD seem to only one who have made an AGP ver of there video cards

Maybe they (Nvidia) has learned that there are users out there who would use faster gfx cards if they were there....interesting..


also, I would have to think that with AGP motherboards, most of them are connected to older cpu sockets meaning that the system most likely has an older cpu. Keep in mind that older cpus (like a P4 @2.4ghz... or AMD +2600) bottleneck the gpu making the cpu the weakest link.

ON the contrary, I do believe that there are motherboards out there that support AGP and PCI express. They are supposed to be superior to others though...

Wait, what? How did you come up with that? As far as I know the PCI-e slot is definitely supplying full bandwidth (unless in SLI mode on certain motherboards) so I have no idea what you were saying here :?: