I am considering moving over to Core 2 platform. However because my previous rig was a AMD Athlon XP 3200+ I invested in a Radeon X1950PRO AGP card thinking I was going to be stuck with this system for quite a while so I may as well make myself more comfortable.

Until I have enough money and a decent graphics card comes along to replace my X1950PRO without extortionate prices to match, I have decided to get one of these AsRock boards that will let me use my trusty AGP card with a shiny new Core 2 and DDR2 Memory. However one thing that is concerning me is the fact that my PCI Express lane will be 4X - this seems to be the case on many Asrock Combo boards.

Does this mean that by moving to PCI Express which is restricted to 4x I will be going backwards in technology and getting slower performance from PCI Express cards than I would with AGP??

I'm using one of those boards as a stopgap, as we speak. (Striker has gone titsup again)
I have an 8800 Gtx in it, and it seems much better than my 8x AGP, 7800 Gainward Bliss GS (7900).
I guess it'll depend on the cards in question, I plan on changing this when I replace/rma the striker, but it is running Graw2 on 1920*1200, high everything at the mo!

You may find this article an interesting read:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/0 [...] _analysis/

There is an article about this in THG. Try searching on that on reviews. Might help.....

I heard up to 30% hits on performance when its at 4x, at 8x its like less than 10%, on the PCI-express side of things.

From the link I mentioned earlier:

Interesting - the article shows how much slower PCI-E x4 is than x16 but how does this stack up alongside AGP 8x.

For example the HD3850 is soon to come onto AGP - I am contemplating getting a HD3850 on AGP 8x if the PCI-E at 4x will work out slower than AGP.

If I remember right, AGP 8x has roughly the same bandwidth as PCI-E x8.

So in that case with this combo board I will be better off staying with AGP!!?!?!

What a **** up design!!