which card for agp 4x?

[pekstein]

Ok, i owned a Geforce 4 Ti 4400 for the last few months until it broke and i rma'd it. so, newegg gave me a $200 refund. i want to get the best card for $200 at the moment. however, my motherboard (asus P4S533) only supports agp 4x. so, ive read a lot of reviews and benchmarks, and it looks like the ATI 9500 pro ($175) would be my best bet for future performance in gaming, at that price of course. but, its AGP 8x, which my mobo does not support, so id have to run it in 4x mode, which would be a waste of its 8x capability, right? so, im thinking about getting a Chaintech Ti 4600 ($198), which is 4x and would give me more performance than a 9500 for the time being. What do you think i should buy?


keep in mind that i do not want to replace my motherboard with one that supports agp 8x.

pekstein

<i> Garth, marriage is punishment for shoplifting in some countries. </i>

 

[Spitfire_x86]

R9500 Pro is a newer generation card, it's definately a better buy than Ti4600

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[CasualCat2001]

agreed

 

[pekstein]

really? even if i can only run it at agp 4x?

<i> Garth, marriage is punishment for shoplifting in some countries. </i>

 

[lwj81]

It will run fine at 4x.There is really no performance increase going with 8x.

 

[pekstein]

hmm then why even have 8x?


anyway, i can get this:

SAPPHIRE ATI OEM RADEON 9500 PRO 128MB DDR DVI BULK


at newegg for $177
but it is OEM. oh well
i think i will buy it.

<i> Garth, marriage is punishment for shoplifting in some countries. </i>

 

[cheekybeast]

Mostly marketing I guess... could be useful in the future when scenes being rendered are a lot larger.

 

[Crashman]

hmm then why even have 8x?

Easy answer, they figured you'd want it sooner or later, so they had to introduce it sometime.

Right now it is mostly a marketing gimmick. But remember that the TNT2 was the first for an AGP4x card, and it wasn't untile the GeForce3 that anything actually needed AGP4x for a noticable performance gain. That means there was the TNT2...then the GeForce...then the GeForce2...and finally the GeForce3...AGP4x wasn't put to good use until 3 generations of card after it was introduced!

We might not see that with AGP8x. Because by the time the 3rd generation of chips for AGP8x cards is introduced, AGP may be replaced entirely by a new slot standard; Intel's PCI-Express.

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>

 

[cleeve]

Even the newest video cards won't saturate the 4x AGP bus bandwidth yet.

AGP 8x is nothing more than a marketing gimmick until the bottlenecks in the rest of PC architecture are freed up.

In short, buy the fastest video card you can afford.

 

[pekstein]

hmm so i guess that would be the 9500 pro, i think. (under $200, of course)

<i> Garth, marriage is punishment for shoplifting in some countries. </i>