ECS should be commended for trying to address the most significant reason that many people hesitate to upgrade their systems. At first glance, revitalizing the PCI bus under the term "AGP Express" seems a bit odd. However, although the performance numbers are expectedly low, they might still be good enough for many users to tolerate them for a limited timeframe - let's say, until the next graphics upgrade.

People that need to run professional graphics applications (as represented by the SPECviewperf 8 suite) should definitely go straight to PCI Express - the performance impact of AGP Express on demanding software is large enough to noticeably decrease productivity. Note that although we did all our tests using DDR2-533 memory, the results with DDR400 are only slightly different.

For example, if an Athlon XP system or an older Pentium 4 machine needs to be upgraded due to insufficient CPU performance, the 915P-A comes into play. This is especially true if you can keep using existing DDR400 memory, which will help keep upgrade expenses down.

The only downside of the 915P-A is its sparse feature set and range of supplied components; we did not even find USB adapter modules inside the box.