AGP OR PCI EXPRESS ???

[shahzad]

Hi i am planing for buying a graphics card for my system, right now its based on agp motherboard i was wondering to change the board and get a pci-x card under 280 $. or should i buy an agp card i am confused !!!

Or should i sell my board and processor and get a new board, processor and graphics card for about 460$...

My system specification are...

AMD ATHLON 64 3200+ socket 939
MSI NVIDIA k8n neo2 PLATINUM
KINGSTON 1GB RAM
ASUS FX 5200 128MB GRAHPICS


PLZ can anyone help me, i am not a hardcore gamer but still want to play games in a good frame rates... i want a sloution for future...

 

[pauldh]

You can buy an NF4 mobo and X1900GT PCI-e for under $250, or you can soon buy an AGP X1950 pro for $250. Both will perform very close with a slight stock speed advantage to the X1950 pro. Overclocked the X1900GT should pull ahead. If you are willing to do some work, go PCI-e. You can sell the K8N neo 2 platinum mobo (NF3U) and recoup some money for the time/labor of the mobo swap.

 

[Slobogob]

Go PCIe. Just compare the prices of AGP cards to their PCIe counterparts. Getting a new board might be a little more expensive, but buying an AGP card is like throwing away money.

 

[xhumeka]

Go PCIe. Just compare the prices of AGP cards to their PCIe counterparts. Getting a new board might be a little more expensive, but buying an AGP card is like throwing away money.

pfffft... I beg to differ. I plan to buy the sapphire x1950 pro AGP (512 megs ram) for my athlon 3200 system, and here's why...

pci-e 2.0 should be out by first quarter 2007, and with the new quad core CPU's being introduced, the whole industry will be changing very rapidly again.

spend the $250 on a GREAT AGP card, and wait another 6 months to a year. All these people telling you to convert to pci-e NOW will eat their words and be upgrading again themselves next summer!

 

[melarcky]

Go PCIe. Just compare the prices of AGP cards to their PCIe counterparts. Getting a new board might be a little more expensive, but buying an AGP card is like throwing away money.

pfffft... I beg to differ. I plan to buy the sapphire x1950 pro AGP (512 megs ram) for my athlon 3200 system, and here's why...

pci-e 2.0 should be out by first quarter 2007, and with the new quad core CPU's being introduced, the whole industry will be changing very rapidly again.

spend the $250 on a GREAT AGP card, and wait another 6 months to a year. All these people telling you to convert to pci-e NOW will eat their words and be upgrading again themselves next summer!

ok first of all you are just going to waste you cash because...
even though PCI-Express 2.0 is coming next year that doesn't mean the cards wont work with PCI-EXPRESS 1.0 kinda like AGP 4x slot with AGP8x slot...
Also if you keep thinking like that then when PCI-Express 2.0 comes out you will be like why... when PCI-3.0 is only around the corner... better take the advice of the others.... get a PCI-Express MoBo and the x1900GT and over clock it. or just leave it
it will last you a pretty long time and you will have still be able to upgrade later to something better ... such as a DX10 card... in stead of just maxing out your AGP system and never being able to and anything more

 

[4745454b]

All these people telling you to convert to pci-e NOW will eat their words and be upgrading again themselves next summer!

Probably, but I'll bet more then half of them would be upgrading whether PCIe 2.0 was out or not...

Here's the cheapest x1900GT that newegg has. $177 counting shipping. This leaves you with almost $80 to buy a S939 motherboard. Swap your ram and CPU over, and you WILL see a night and "holy crap spotlight, stare right at the sun" day difference between the x1900GT and the (ha ha ha ha, you bought a FX5200....) 5200. If your a gamer, you will be in heaven.

 

[3lfk1ng]

ugh.
@xhumeka
Pfffft is Dario's term..refrain from using it on THGFZ

Your going to have some serious drawbacks using your Athlon 3200+ with that videocard. If you get a x1950pro agp...its going to be bottlenecked because your processor is too slow for that videocard. Anything at or equivilant to an Ati x1650 or Nvidia 7600 series card is about as far as your system can handle. Anything more is just wasted money because the framerate will be capped by your Athlon 3200+. Just my $0.02

@shahzad

Get a cheap pci-e mobo....and a video card. The video card will still be compatable with pci-e 2.0 and you can use that card with a newer generation card in crossfire to take advantage of physx.

If you went agp it wouldn't be able to get used on a new motherboard when you decide to get one. So you would be wasting money going with agp only because there is no life for those cards outside of agp (pci-e is standard agp is heavily outdated). Again, I suggest going for Pci-e.

 

[Slobogob]

Go PCIe. Just compare the prices of AGP cards to their PCIe counterparts. Getting a new board might be a little more expensive, but buying an AGP card is like throwing away money.

pfffft... I beg to differ. I plan to buy the sapphire x1950 pro AGP (512 megs ram) for my athlon 3200 system, and here's why...

pci-e 2.0 should be out by first quarter 2007, and with the new quad core CPU's being introduced, the whole industry will be changing very rapidly again.

spend the $250 on a GREAT AGP card, and wait another 6 months to a year. All these people telling you to convert to pci-e NOW will eat their words and be upgrading again themselves next summer!

Nope. PCIe 2.0 will be backwards compatible. The most recent GPUs just started to scratch the bandwidth limits of PCIe 8x so it´s safe to assume that 16x will still hold for a while. The only interesting difference is the power the PCIe supplies with 2.0.
And even if PCIe would be incoompatible with PCIe 2.0 and the switch would be magically pulled on January the 1st, a current PCIe board would still be a good investment and probably hold over the next 2 if not 3 years, just like AGP did when PCIe emerged.
If you buy a 1950 Pro AGP you pay premium for it, just because it´s AGP. It would make sense not to upgrade if someone has a super expensive high end AGP board. Even though that could be sold and a similar one bought with PCIe.

 

[xhumeka]

I agree that you could be stuck in an endless loop if you always think, "but wait, there will be something better next month!"

however, upgrading from AGP to pci-e NOW still makes little sense to me. Sure, if you had asked me this last year at this time, I would also have advised to upgrade to pci-e. But again, with quad core cpu's and pci 2.0 around the corner, wouldn't it make more sense to wait just a little longer? Upgrading to pci-e right now seems just a little too late in my opinion...

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...

 

[melarcky]

Actually I doubt that the CPU IS TOO weak.. yes it could use an nice upgrade but the CPU isn't a GF8800GTX
The x1900GT is still an mid-range VGA
And if he really thinks that it needs a little more juice he can over clock it...
we all know that the 3200+'s over clock well

 

[Slobogob]

I agree that you could be stuck in an endless loop if you always think, "but wait, there will be something better next month!"

however, upgrading from AGP to pci-e NOW still makes little sense to me. Sure, if you had asked me this last year at this time, I would also have advised to upgrade to pci-e. But again, with quad core cpu's and pci 2.0 around the corner, wouldn't it make more sense to wait just a little longer? Upgrading to pci-e right now seems just a little too late in my opinion...

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...

If it is a little, then i´d agree, but as far as i know, PCIe 2.0 comes around Q3 2007. At least that´s what i read. I could be mistaken though.

 

[4745454b]

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...

So spend $250 on something that is at the end of its life instead of spending $250 on something NEAR the end of its life? I don't get it. Besides, if he buys the AGP card, he'll still be stuck on AGP. If he buys the "same" card with a new motherboard that supports newer videocards, he'll come out ahead.

A 3200+ is fine for a x1900 card.

 

[3lfk1ng]

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.

 

[xhumeka]

Well, I guess I'll just have to dig myself out of my deep hole next summer, but I don't anticipate it being too much difficulty

I'm going to spend $250 on this AGP card NOW, and play all my games for the next 6 months.

Next summer when the quad core cpu's and mobo's have came down in price and the dx10 cards have had a chance to come out, THEN I'll upgrade...

We'll see who's system has the staying power. By waiting an extra 6 months, I really feel you could build a system that could last you much longer than any system you try to build now.

 

[Slobogob]

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.

That doesn´t really matter. Some component will always bottleneck another. In his case the 1950 will not live up to its full potential, which is not really a big deal. It´ll still outperform the 7600GT and probably the 7900GS (not overclocked). Considering the price of the card, i´d say it is still a good choice for an upgrade. Especially considering that he could easily remove that bottleneck later on with a newer processor. The green chips are the cheap chips again.

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.

Primitive?

That´s either a poor choice of words or outright insulting. A 3200XP is far from primitive.

 

[melarcky]

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

 

[Heyyou27]

Go PCIe. Just compare the prices of AGP cards to their PCIe counterparts. Getting a new board might be a little more expensive, but buying an AGP card is like throwing away money.

pfffft... I beg to differ. I plan to buy the sapphire x1950 pro AGP (512 megs ram) for my athlon 3200 system, and here's why...

pci-e 2.0 should be out by first quarter 2007, and with the new quad core CPU's being introduced, the whole industry will be changing very rapidly again.

spend the $250 on a GREAT AGP card, and wait another 6 months to a year. All these people telling you to convert to pci-e NOW will eat their words and be upgrading again themselves next summer!As far as I know, there has been no announcement on the release of PCIe 2.0.

 

[leo2kp]

"We'll see who's system has the staying power. By waiting an extra 6 months, I really feel you could build a system that could last you much longer than any system you try to build now."

So in 6 months when you see what else is coming out, you going to wait another 6 months for that? The industry moves too fast as it is...there is no waiting for something that's going to stick around. Nothing sticks around. Wait for PCI-E 2.0, wait for AMD Quad-cores, wait for Intel's 45nm processors, wait for Infinion's 3-D transistors to slip its way in to future processors, wait for...what? This is one of the fastest moving hobbies. If you're the type to wait, you'll be disappointed because there's always something better on the horizon.

Just suck it up and buy now IMO.

 

[Slobogob]

As far as I know, there has been no announcement on the release of PCIe 2.0.

Here we go. Looks like sombody got to wait for quite a while.

PCIe 2

 

[Liquidus]

I agree with Pauldh's original advice in this topic.

For all you people insisting on upgrading to pci-express, I don't see such a clear choice. Correct me if I'm wrong, but here's my reasoning:

Let's say the OP could buy a AGP x1950 pro for $250 OR a s939 mobo with a pci-e x1950 pro for $250. You get the same performance for the same price, except that you have a pci-express motherboard now. What's the big difference? It's not like you can use the pci-express vid card ANY LONGER than the agp one. AND when you want to get an even better graphics card like the 8800gtx, are you going to stick with the s939 mobo with the 3200+? No, you will buy a completely new system, JUST like if you had originally stuck with AGP. Am I right or am I wrong?

 

[4745454b]

Yes and no. At least if you had the PCIe motherboard, you have the CHOICE of upgrading everything else. By staying closer to the front of technology, you have more choices and options then if your stuck nearer the back...

 

[Liquidus]

Yes you would have the choice of upgrading more, but it would be a bad idea to waste money on upgrading that cpu. Whether you stuck with agp or bought a 939 mobo, you would probably buy a Conroe mobo after that.

Assuming it costs the same amount to get the AGP gpu VS pci-express mobo +similiar gpu (hard to get), I imagine one advantage of going pci-express would be that it's easier to sell off your old pci-e stuff rather than your super old agp stuff when you buy a new system.

 

[quantumsheep]

Hi i am planing for buying a graphics card for my system, right now its based on agp motherboard i was wondering to change the board and get a pci-x card under 250 $. or should i buy an agp card i am confused !!! my system specification are...

AMD ATHLON 64 3200+
MSI NVIDIA 3 PLATINUM
KINGSTON 1GB RAM
ASUS FX 5200 128MB GRAHPICS


PLZ can anyone help what should i buy a new motherbaord and pci-x card or an agp card, plz also refer which cards to buy...

Buy a cheap PCI-E capable motherboard (Around $50) and buy an x1950pro PCI-E for around $200.

 

[4745454b]

First, lets state the obvious. You can not get rid of bottlenecks. It is impossible. There will always be something holding your system back. It might be the amount of memory you have, or your harddrive, or something else. The simple fact is there will always be a slowest thing in your computer. Even if you could somehow have the perfect balance of hardware in which everthing moves at the same speed, I would aruge the software will become the new bottleneck. (for example, you could move to 4GB of system memory, but then windowsXP will prevent you from being able to use it due to its memory allocations.)

Second, yes. A faster CPU will allow a GPU to render more FPS. I doubt this is news to anyone. Check this out. The fastest none FX CPU can output 10FPS more then the 3200+ (look up to the 3800+, none x2 model.) This is an extra 13% more. Yes the faster CPU will get you more, but its not like the 3200+ will make the video card able to render only 25FPS. I belive this is a good idea to upgrade because he is simply moving from one bottleneck to another.

Currently, his GPU is (no offence OP) WEAK. An 5200 is simply to slow of a GPU to handle anything recent. By getting a new video card, he WILL be able to handle recent games. He will enjoy using it, then upgrade his CPU when money permits. (unless a new bottleneck presents itself.) I would not urge him to buy a new CPU first, nor would I urge him to upgrade them together. The new GPU will allow him to game, while waiting for newer better CPUs to be developed.

 

[Surferosa]

however, upgrading from AGP to pci-e NOW still makes little sense to me. Sure, if you had asked me this last year at this time, I would also have advised to upgrade to pci-e. But again, with quad core cpu's and pci 2.0 around the corner, wouldn't it make more sense to wait just a little longer? Upgrading to pci-e right now seems just a little too late in my opinion...

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...

I'm missing something here. So he can spend $250 on an agp card, or $250 on a PCI-E card & mobo and will get approximately the same performance level. And PCI-E 2.0 is going to be backwards compatible. Whether it is released in 6/9/12 months.

Make it really simple for me. Why on earth would he buy an agp card?