AGP/PCI advice

[spitoon]

After a few years of playing around with a machine that had no AGP slot, I finally built a budget system with one. I had upgraded the vid card in my old system a couple of times and have a 128MB GeForce FX5200 PCI card and a 64MB GeForce2 MX400 PCI card. In order to keep the costs down, I put the 128MB PCI card in my 'new' build.

My question is: How would the same 128MB GeForce FX5200 AGP card compare to its PCI counterpart??? As I said, it is something of a 'budget build' so I don't really want to spend a lot on it, however I have seen this card for a farily good price...is it worth the change??

The specs are all the same when it comes to core clock, mem clock, memory bandwidth, fill rate, verticies etc... so what are the real world performance differences???

 

[mbacko1]

I think you would receive a significant improvement going to am AGP card, especially if you are moving to it for gaming and/or photo/video editing. The AGP bus has a faster data connection to the processor and RAM than a board in the PCI bus. This is going to lead to faster graphic rendering. I have a system with onboard SIS AGP and I added a PCI card with a Radeon graphics and the system slowed down.

 

[cleeve]

The memory difference will offer you absolutely no performance gains in today's games. Might be worth a couple frames per second on future titles, but those cards don't really have the processing power to play future titles anyway.

Any speed difference will be because of the different architectures of the two chips. The Geforce2 MX should be slower than the GeforceFX 5200, simply because the 5200 is a newer and better chip.

[EDIT]
Sorry, I thought you were comparing the 5200 to the Geforce2 MX.

Coparing a 5200 AGP with a 5200 PCI? You won't see much of a difference, but the AGP card will run a bit faster because the bus offers better bandwidth. Not tons faster mind you... you might see a 5 to 10% difference, depending on the game and wether or not it's bandwidth limited.

------------------
Radeon 9500 (modded to PRO w/8 pixel pipelines)
AMD AthlonXP 2000+
3dMark03: 3529

 

[ufo_warviper]

Screw the Fx 5200! If your on an extremely tight budget, your best bet is the Ti4200 card. YOu can pick the MSI 64MB one up for $80 at <A HREF="http://www.gameve.com" target="_new">http://www.gameve.com</A> What is your budget by the way?

My OS features preemptive multitasking, a fully interactive command line, & support for 640K of RAM!

 

[spitoon]

I'm certainly not married to the FX5200. I would prefer to stay with Nvidia based cards, as I know they work with all the stuff I have going on. I was just interested in comparing 'apples to apples', that is why I asked about the PCI and AGP versions of the same card.

As far as my budget goes, I was looking at the following:

1 - XFX GeForce FX 5200 256MB DDR AGP8X with TV & DVI - $151Cdn

2 - PNY GeForceFX 5200 128MB AGP 8X TV-Out Video Card - $128Cdn (exact card I have except mine is PCI)

3 - XFX Geforce4 Ti4200 128MB DDR AGP8X with TV-Out & DVI - $151Cdn


I suppose the other question is that my motherboard claims to support only AGP4X, will this be a problem with these newer 8X cards. Am I wasting my money on these new cards? I could look at something older, but at 128MB and above, there is not much out there.


<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by spitoon on 09/22/03 06:22 PM.</EM></FONT></P>