Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: MANDO on February 08, 2005, 12:07:48 PM
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The end of AGP cards?
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Eventually yes, but you will still be able to get them for a while yet. Don't forget, if you look, you can still get old style PCI cards.
http://www.dabs.com/uk/channels/components/graphicscards/productView.htm?quicklinx=374N (http://www.dabs.com/uk/channels/components/graphicscards/productView.htm?quicklinx=374N)
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Im in a cunundrum not...Im about to upgrade and wanted to go PCI-E...but the diference in price between the MOBO and the HUGE inflated price of the PCI-E cards makes it a little hard to swallow.
Once you get past 6600gt, the PCI-e cards seem to have a 100-150 premium....and they are no faster than agp.
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Big difference is the SLI capability, like the old 3DFX Voodoo 2 cards (2 PCI cards working as a single one).
Sooner or later you will be able to adquire cheap PCIe cards and put several cards to work together to achieve outstanding performance, it would be like a multiprocessor video system.
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NVidia's SLI is nothing like the old Voodoo system. The 3DFX system worked transparently to the software.
NVidia's SLI does not and requires profiles for each game/applcation that wants to use it.
PCI-E is taking over, but therei s nothing to be gained from it right now. The only reason system manufacturers are cutting over to it so quickly is it allows them to build motherboards cheaper. Same reason SATA caught on so quickly as well.
Right now is a good time to build a very high end AGP based system, as it probably will be the last time you will be able to do so. If you keep a computer a long time (more than 2 years), then I would go for the trusted/stable hardware versus the new kid on the block who has shown signs of teething pains.
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like mine?
athlon 3000+(newcastle) 64 bit
sapphire 9600xt(9800 pro very soon)
msi k8t neo(via chip)
2 80 gig sata, 1 40g ide for storage
1 gig kingston ddr400 ram......
stable, runs at a max of 118 deg. f, never crashes, runs every game on the market very good, and proves that 11 fans can be quiet :aok
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Big surprise. Visited some hardware shops near home and most available cards were already PCIe.
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Bah! I still think SLI is a really untidy, overblown thing for the type of guys who buy these ugly red cases with dragons on them. Yeuch!
Give me a fast, neat single card solution anyday.Less is more.
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I have a quesiton when I uprade in the not so near future can I keep my two IDE hardrives and 2 IDE DVD/CD-rWs?
And my AGP card?
How about RAM what type of ram do the newer consoles use DDR RAM or this new DDR2?
I am in the same predicament as Mando,as I do too think it's a waste of money ATM to upgrade my mobo and CPU, even though they're reaching their end of their useful lifespan as my main rig. So,meaning I could upgrade some RAM of the 3200 variety and hold on for a few more months and/or get a mobo that everything is new.
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AGP based motherboards are going away. How much longer they are available is a bit of an unknown.
The IDE bus seems alive still as it is still in use by CD/DVD drives, so it will be a while before it goies away.
Intel jumped on the DDR2 bus, but it crashed and will eventually suffer the same fate as RAMBUS did in its use for computer systems. DDR3 will eventually replace DDR, but it will be a while.
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and SATA DVD Drives are coming..
here we have one example.
http://www.plextor.be/products/px-712sa.asp?choice=PX-712SA
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I want ide to die, I never liked those clumsy huge ribbon cables. The sooner optical drives shift to SATA the better.
I like SATA but I wonder why wasnt USB 2 used as an internal connector? On the surface that would seem to be a great idea to standardize all manner of internal and extrernal connections.
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You die! I just bought me self a 250gb IDEHard drive damnit! :D
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Grun, USB is a brain dead interface designed for byte handling. It really cannot handle a continous stream without killing your computers performance, or getting a ton of errors.
It was never designed for that.
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Originally posted by Skuzzy
PCI-E is taking over, but therei s nothing to be gained from it right now. The only reason system manufacturers are cutting over to it so quickly is it allows them to build motherboards cheaper. Same reason SATA caught on so quickly as well.
Right now is a good time to build a very high end AGP based system, as it probably will be the last time you will be able to do so. If you keep a computer a long time (more than 2 years), then I would go for the trusted/stable hardware versus the new kid on the block who has shown signs of teething pains.
I would agree most definitely with watching carefully before jumping into the PCI-e market. Who says 16x is not going to be obsolete next year? They are still selling MOBO's with single 1x PCI-e slots.
However, saying there is "nothing to be gained from it right now" is a little bit of a stretch. If you could find MOBO's that were identical except for the type of video slot (one with a 16x PCI-e slot, one with a AGP 8x slot) and run them side by side, you would see a performance increase. Maybe not huge. But I would bet money it would be there. Problem is, try to find such a MOBO. While AGP is pretty common on the 754 boards, you might find a Socket 754 with a single 16x slot, but they are pretty rare. Most of the 16x stuff is on the Socket 939 boards. I dont know the Intel chip MOBO's that well, so it might be you could find it there.
Basically what I'm saying is, if they want to upgrade to really take advantage of the PCI-e stuff, they have to upgrade MOBO and processor as well. By doing so, they put the entire computer in a whole different ballpark of performance. By default, upgrading to a top of the line PCI-e/SLI setup will boost your performace incredibly because it forces you to upgrade the foundation at the same time. Why spend the money to upgrade to a high end AGP setup? If you are going to spend that money anyway, spend another 15% and go all the way. The prices on AGP are not dropping like I thought they would. If anything, they have gone back up a little from where they were when the 6800 and x800 first came out (although the top cards have come down a bit, but not much).
Bottom line for me is, I'm good enough with my current socket A/AGP8x platform that I can hold off for a year or so before needing to worry that much. But for a guy who has an older PIII or even a AGP4x type board with slower FSB...........for anyone faced with a more immediate need to upgrade, the money wont be significantly more to go PCI-e, he might as well. The performance increases will more than repay the extra money spent.
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Skuzz if I bought myself a PC3200 512 mb stick of ram would I be wasting my money?
Is it transferable to the newer 939 boards?
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I'm not the skuzzmeister, but...
pc3200 is a nice match for current socket 939 boards but AMD would be crazy to stick with a 200mhz fsb. Intel has already pushed their officially supported bus speed to 233mhz, and many overclockers are proving that 250mhz is not unreachable even with current hardware. Based on that, I'd expect the standard FSB to jump to 250mhz eventually and pc3200 will be a bit slow. If you're going to want to use it in a future computer, you will be better off with pc4000 or getting very high quality low latency pc3200.
If you can find a great bargain on pc3200, then that might be a reason to get it because most computers will let you run the memory at a slower speed than the cpu's FSB, but you'll see a performance hit.
I wouldn't buy more stuff now to put into a future computer. Buy to fill your needs now, using as high a quality of parts as you can afford. Then when it's time to make a big upgrade, you can reuse those parts that still make sense to reuse, but you're not tied to using expensive but obsolete parts that you'd purchased long before simply because you wanted them for your next computer. Fill your needs now, and if you choose wisely then some of those parts will still be usable after future upgrades. PC4000 is pretty much the top of the line spec for DDR, so that would probably be the safest way to go. Just look at the rated timings at that speed to figure out how good the memory is.
Or get the cheapest (but still name brand) memory you can right now, and give up on the idea of moving it to your next computer. Fill your needs now with what goes good in your current system, otherwise you're chasing the upgrade train and you'll never catch it.
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Does anyone know if the second SLI PCI-E slot can be used for anything other than another graphics chip in SLI?
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Not yet but just like when isa gave way to pci, pci will likely give way to pci-e so you'll see network, sound, etc. cards start to appear for pci-e.
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hmm...very well.
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Rumors are that AMD will move to a 250mhz bus on the 939/940 platform. This will give 500mhz each way (1000HT bus). you can actually do this already on a lot of the s939 boards by getting DDR500 and setting the HT bus to 1000. Requires a few other BIOS tweaks (eg dropping the CPU multipleir) but thats the gist of it.