AGP vs PCI-E 1.0 vs PCI-E 2.0

MrMeth

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Sep 11, 2007
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Im sure by now most of you have seen the article about scaling on the PCI e to 2.0 but what i would have loved to see them include in this review is current graphics cards on the agp bus just to see how much or if any increase was to be had from moving to agp to Pci E I always thought the agp bus had more life then what they said and the way things are going it was it looks like it was just a way for ATI/Nvidia to sell us there sli and crossfire cards , what do you guys think ? I mean they had the 3850 on that review and if im not mistaken they have a 3850 agp card they could have just thrown it on there to show the scaling from agp to Pci E 1.0 to 2.0 If you havent read it heres the article , just throwing out there just to see what people think.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-2-0,1915.html
 
First of all you should put in more commas and full-stops.
Dude! Difference between AGP and PCI-E is so BIG!
for refrence

PCI 132 MB/s
AGP 8X 2,100 MB/s
PCI Express 1x 250 [500]* MB/s
PCI Express 2x 500 [1000]* MB/s
PCI Express 4x 1000 [2000]* MB/s
PCI Express 8x 2000 [4000]* MB/s
PCI Express 16x 4000 [8000]* MB/s
Anyway, the difference between PCI-E1 and PCI-E2 isn't that big, so don't need to like, upgrade to PCI2 if you got a PCI1 already.

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6565&Itemid=40&limit=1&limitstart=1
http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/powercolor_hd3850/
Try these pages
 
Damn, ya beat me to it.
I was just refreshing my self on the actuial numbers to...

I would agree with everything you said except



There is a huge difference between PCI-e 1.1 and 2.0.
PCI-e 2 doubles the bandwidth!
Just because the current generation cards do not really need that overhead does not mean that the G200 (or what ever it is called now) and later GPUs will not benifit from it.
 


You pinned it right on. Just one more thing to add to the conversation. AGP isnt Full-Duplex, PCIe is. This was the main reason. whne they both show up i remember testing a AGP8x to PCIe8x and the diference was little to none.
There was never a "solid" AGP SLI for example, just because it wasnt full duplex. In terms of ram power, it was a nice tecnology.It wasnt Half-duplex either because the upstream rate was really really low. So its was dumped for that reason alone.

 
I know that agp was going to top out eventually , but i just think when they made the move over it was premature , and plus it would have been nice to see how an agp 3450 would stack up against the PCI-E version thats it. i know PIC-E is a faster bus then agp but it was just to compare .. i mean there still making cards it would have been a good review for everyone still wondering if they should get a better agp card or just a new system .
 
I saw another review a while ago regarding scaling (and the recent one too). It seems like a 9800GTX, 8800GTX, and 8800Ultra (and possibly the 8800GTS G92 & GT) are the only cards that are really effected in a measurable way with PCIe 8x. Given that AGP 8x is slightly faster than PCIe 8x, no card on that is available for that interface will be limited by it's bus width.

The problem that AGP has is that except for a few ASrock boards you're limited to older single core CPUs (which will impose a bottleneck when paired with, say, a 3850). Additionally, the only powerful DX10 GPU for AGP is the 3850. On top of that it's much more expensive than it's PCIe equivalent.

In short: PCIe is the way to go. If AGP still has support in terms of chipsets and mid-high end cards (nVidia I'm talking about you) it would be worth it. However, the industry has decided (for the most part) to stop supporting it, and therefore an upgrade is inline.
 



Sorry, but I count a total of 2133 MB/s bidirectional for 8x AGP and 2000MB/s (250MB/s * 8 lanes) unidirectional (4000MB/s total) for PCI-e 8x.

I think the closest comparison would be to 4x PCI-e with its 2000MB/s total bandwidth (1000MB/s up, 1000MB/s down).
 

I stand corrected.
 
There I was worrying about a 8x + 8x sli bottlenecking my PC but it would seem that my new cards that I am getting (2x XFX 8800GTS Alpha Dog 512mb) only will use 60% of the total bandwidth of 8x + 8x sli mobo and thats when overclocked to 2100+ mhz in each card?
 
Another thing you guys skipped is the power difference between Pci-e 1.x and pci-e 2.0 . The R700 and the gt200 needs power from pci-e 2.0 slot. Forget about agp even a entry level 73gt needs power from the psu because its underfed by the slot alone.