I still think spending $250 on your existing AGP platform and waiting a LITTLE LONGER will be a wiser move than jumping on the pci-e 1.0 bandwagon at the end of it's life...
You just burried yourself in a deep deep hole.
AGP < PCI-E
Agp is dead...not worth paying any money for. There is no future for it and wasting any money on anything that is agp is just pointless.
PCI-E is not even close to being at the end of it's life and like Slobogob said, we have yet to even scrath the full bandwidth potential of pci-e 16x.
4745454b said it well....cept for the fact that the Athlon 3200+ will bottleneck the x1950pro
Pci-e 2.0 is backwards compatible with current pci-e so if the man boguht a video card...that was agp...he would be sol as far as options go.
If the man bought pci-e he could use it in all motherboards for the next couple years and he could pair it with a new videocard and take advantage of physx. That in itself is totally worth it.
@melarcky
Actually I doubt that the CPU IS TOO weak.. yes it could use an nice upgrade but the CPU isn't a GF8800GTX
First of all, an 8800gtx is not a cpu...its a gpu.
Second of all trust me, he will be bottlenecked by that x1950pro....The 3200+ is already slightly bottlenecked by even last generations ATI x850xt.
The highest he could go with that processor and not reach any bottlenecks is at most a x1650 or a 7600. Anything higher and he may still see slight performance gains only because of gpu architecture, gpu speed, and gpu memory and pipelines etc etc, but he will still be capped by his meager cpu performance.
I see that you have an Athlon 3200+ and I know you may be trying to defend it, but any true gains that the processor may see would only be for the gpu architecture itself. The bottleneck would still exist because the processor can only go so fast and could not keep up with a stellar card such as the x1950pro.
He would be better to think of how not to waste his money on a primitive system such as his. He too should just wait.
Anywayz, best of luck to the OP, I gtg to work.
OK first of all I totally agree about the whole PCI-Exprss Vs AGP
We are totally on the same side
Secondly ... I know the GF 8800GTX is a GPU not a CPU it was just a typo after all I know that much
Thirdly I couldn't give a crap about defending my CPU I know its getting a little old... But I am just giving him advice that I believe is true.... But if I had the chance to upgrade I would do it in a heart breat... There is no point to defend Hardware.... Its just Hardware after all