Just read the newest issue of PC World (September 2004) and on page 58 they ran a test of graphics cards based on AGP and PCI-E. Nvidia's board comparison was the 6800GT and for ATI was the X600 XT vs 9600 XT. Basic finding was that no games out today come even close to maxing out the AGP 8X slot bandwidth of 2.1GB, and therefore the performance of the two types of cards showed no real difference, except maybe a single frame rate per minute. Your eye cannot distinguish the difference, is the point...

Also of interest was the fact that in their comparison boards, one of the 6800GT's had 256MB of onboard memory (the PCI-E model) and the other had 128MB (the AGP model). This goes to prove that not only do games not utilize the additional bandwidth of the PCI-E, they also do not use over 128MB of memory in current configurations...

If you have bought a motherboard with PCI-E based graphics and have to buy a PCI-E video card, you should not feel bad about it. Get the card. I am just saying don't do it solely for the graphics performance of PCI-E, as it is no better currently than a comparably equipped AGP setup...

Jason

Jason,

I was wondering if it was really worth spending the extra money for the motherboard that supports the PCI-X. I was looking at one that supports the Intel processors and it was nearly 200.00 and they didn't have the AMD models available yet. We don't play many games at all and our Geforce FX 5200 128MB works great for us.

Thanks for the info. :)

Jon

I've got a co-worker who wants me to build her a computer.

My advice: Don't get anything that hasn't been out for at least a year.

What people tend to forget is that the Intel architecture in the 865/875 chipsets were "mature" not "old." (Kind of like me!)

There's already been at least one production halt. See many of the new graphics cards out there? No.

Matrox is shipping a whole new line of PCI-based multi-monitor cards to bridge the gap. In addition, they're "low profile" to suit a lot of the SFF cases out there today.

I'm sure the new architecture will bring benefits down the road but it might be 18 months before we see a cost/benefit advantage.

Cheers...

Might as well prepare for the future.

Preparing for the future can be very expensive and if you aren't gaining the performance it is wasting money. Putting the extra money into more memory, faster processor will gain you more performance. The PCI-Express is just a reincarnation of older concept in linking graphic cards. Buying a high end Graphics card based on ATI's Radeon or Nvidia's Geforce GPU's will give you enough performance to play the popular video games. The PCI-X option requires you to purchase a very expensive motherboard and then pay extra for the one or two special graphics cards.

Without seeing much gains in performance it seems to be over kill to spend 1000.00 plus for the PCI-Express setup.

Jon

I agree with you, Jon. The games and applications that are available today are just now starting to fully utilize the bandwidth that was available with the AGP 4X specification and not even close to clogging the pipes with the 8X spec yet. Why double the 8X spec to get synthetic performance boosts on benchmarks that you will not 'see' in real world usage?

Add on to that the fact that the bugs are not all worked out of the technology or the distribution pipeline and I see no compelling reason to pay a high premium for the platform yet. Once I see good, real world data that shows the technology is being taken advantage of I will jump, but not before...

IVplay