AGP Is Dead, Almost
Taipei (Taiwan) - You knew it was coming. Four years after the introduction of the first PCI Express chipset, Intel’s 925X, the accelerated graphics port (AGP) is finally running out of steam and products using AGP are very scarce.
If you are still running graphics cards through an AGP interface, you already have to look hard to find any options on the market. When PCI Express became more popular, AGP cards went primarily into cheap PCs and emerging markets. However, that changed sometime last year when Eastern Europe, Russia, CIS and China stopped buying AGP cards and moved on to PCI Express as well. This means there is just the upgrade market for several countries and states in Europe and North America left, which is not large enough to justify new products.
Last year in August, add-in board companies saw AGP finally losing substantial product-mix share and it was only a matter of time when these manufacturers would stop introducing new AGP parts. As it stands right now, the Radeon 3850 appears to be the final AGP "high-end" part on the market.
So, if you are looking to upgrade your ancient, but still kicking AGP system, your options just shrunk to GeCube’s dual-slot overclocked and Sapphire’s single-slot 3850 512 MB cards. We were told heard that the best selling AGP parts are still Radeon 2600XT cards and it remains to be seen how the Radeon 3850 last. If you own an AGP rig, time is slowly running out.
AGP was developed by Intel as a bus designed to replace PCI in graphics applications. AGP was introduced in 1997 with a bandwidth 266 MB/s. AGP 8x topped out at 2133 MB/s.
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velocityg4 This really is not much of a surprise since pretty much any AGP system is crippled by the CPU and RAM speeds. The recent tests on Tomshardware of the 3850 showed that with a lot of new games the CPU bottlenecks the 3850 and framerates rarely will go past the 2600 and x1900 due to this.Reply
If I were to upgrade an AGP system I would only get the 2600xt for HD video playback and HDCP in Vista. The only way I could see getting the 3850 is if I had a rare Core 2 Duo board with AGP support or an older socket 939 Athlon 64 X2. -
babybudha Never disrespect AGP. AGP will live on forever like Disco and New Kids On The Block. AGP for life!Reply -
STFU_Noob_Iownu if u look at it from a theoretical point of view agp is better.... i mean in a hidden power kind of way... their are more possibilities with agp.... as in getting performance for gaming.....Reply
pci-e agp
_______ __________
some can be overclocked most can be overclocked
pipelines cant be opened pipelines can be opened
slower bandwith faster bandwith
connects all app::card::os
in laymens terms if u would look at the options for both types of cards you can see that agp has more to take advantage of especially since it was first designed just for gaming unlike the pci slot was....im not a agp fanboy i just like to look deeper and see what is the best product out there....i just like all of you like to get the best product that will give the best bang for the buck and give my pc performance a skyrocket.....ps... agp cards give a hell of a fps boost when u unlock pipelines and oc it .....so dont desrespect agp... peace out..... -
STFU_Noob_Iownu agpReply
most all can be overclocked
pipelines can be opened
faster bandwith
pci-e
less cards can be overclocked than agp
pipelines cant be opened
slower bandwith
sorry bout the double post ...
my first time and i didnt know it would distort my chart i tried to make