AGP or PCI Express ?

va!n · Post by **va!n** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 12:13 am

Atm i own an ASUS A8V Deluxe, AMD3200 64Bit Venice @ 2 Ghz, 1024 MDT RAM and an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro / 128 MB for graphics. My system and its components are working great, fast and the CPU temperatur is evertime very low, something around 30.

Now i am planing to build a complete new PC based on an ASUS 939 board and an AMD 64 bit CPU. To clear something, i am not a gamer and so i dont need any highlevel components for latest 3D games or so

Here in my town and around it seems to be hard to get again an "ASUS A8V Deluxe" mainboard. I have taked a look to some other/newer ASUS 939 boards and most of this are supporting only "PCI Express" for graphiccards. Getting an good ASUS board with AGP support seems to be very rar here.

Since i dont know really a lot about the so called "PCI Express" stuff, i am a bit confused. Should i build a new system supporting the good old "AGP" or should i build a new system based on PCI Express? (if i want to use PCI Express, i have to buy a mainboard that support this stuff ofcourse.)

I am not really sure if PCI Express will win the market over the AGP stuff, just my opinion. I heared somewhere that it could be possible, that the PCI Express stuff has no chance on the marked gainst the old AGP. :roll:

So it would be great, if some guys (with some experience in this part), can tell me its opinion and maybe giving me some tips which ASUS Mainboard and/or graphiccard would make sence for doing some stuff any maybe 1 or 2 times in the year to play a game like FarCry

So the new graphiccard should have the same power or maybe a bit better as my old ATI Radeon 9600.

What about this ATI Radeon X serie for PCI Express? PCI Express or AGP?

Thanks for your feedback.

Btw i am thinking to use again an AMD3200+ or AMD3500+ for the new system.

rsts · Post by **rsts** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 1:33 am

From what I've read PCI express is the "future" and good old agp has about seen it's days.

If I were going new I'd go PCI express because the card will last you through the current "next generation" of mainboards and will probably support what the "gamers" force on us for the next couple of years:)

IMO agp offers a better price performance so if I were going bang for the buck I'd probably pick agp.

cheers

Joakim Christiansen · Post by **Joakim Christiansen** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 1:39 am

PCI-E is much faster than your AGP port!
And most of the new (good) cards are now only for PCI-E.
You really should go with it!

va!n · Post by **va!n** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 2:15 am

i thought about it after your posts and i think i will use PCI-E for the planed PC. Btw, do you have any product tips for a good PCI-E based ASUS board and a good/middleclass PCI-E card? thx

White Eagle · Post by **White Eagle** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 4:09 am

I am not really sure if PCI Express will win the market over the AGP stuff,

It already has won. Soon, you will have a hard time finding new cards that support AGP, when you do they will likely be the slower "budget" versions of the new cards.

Tranquil · Post by **Tranquil** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 5:33 am

va!n wrote:i thought about it after your posts and i think i will use PCI-E for the planed PC. Btw, do you have any product tips for a good PCI-E based ASUS board and a good/middleclass PCI-E card? thx

ATI X800 Chipset is a middleprices GFX card wich should work with most games. Dont know on Nvidias chipsets for now as I made very negative experiences with my last nvidia cards, so nvidia is out of order for me.

By the way, I checked the prices of PCIe and AGP last days here in germany and PCIe-Based GFX Cards are MUCH cheaper then AGP ones!

Bonne_den_kule · Post by **Bonne_den_kule** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 7:38 am

A change my AthlonXp 2500+, 1GB ram and Radeon 9600 for a Athlon 64 X2 3800+, 2GB and Geforce 7600 GS(PCI-E). The geforce is 2 or 3 times faster than my old radeon 9600.

thefool · Post by **thefool** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 9:55 am

And how do you know its that much faster when you also changed the other stuff?

va!n · Post by **va!n** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 10:00 pm

Now i have picked out an ASUS PCI-E board. Now i have 6 PCI-E graphiccards and i am not relly sure which is good or bad. I just got the tip from a pc hardware seller, that the both GigaByte cards may be a good solution for me. Has someone any experience with one or some of this cards?
Btw, is there any site with available where you can select your wished cards and getting a small result of the speed different (3d benchmark test i.e.) ? For me all this cards and chipsets are really a jungle.

a) Asus Extreme AX1600XT/SILENT/TVD/256
b) Asus Extreme AX850PRO/HTVD
c) Sapphire Radeon X1600 PRO Full
d) Sapphire Radeon X1600 PRO Lite
e) GigaByte X1600XT SilentPipe
f) GigaByte X1600PRO SilentPipe 2

Thanks for any hints ^^

blueznl · Post by **blueznl** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 10:12 pm

at the moment i would go for a 7900'er i guess

THCM · Post by **THCM** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 10:14 pm

Hi Thorsten,

I hope you didn't chose one of these boards: Asus A8N-E, Asus A8N-SLI, Asus A8N-Sli Deluxe. All these boards share the same cheap and loud chipset fan! When You don't want to overclock take a look at the Gigabyte GA-K8NF9 Ultra. Just the same like Asus A8N-E, but it has no fan and it has IEEE 1394 on board for the same price!

Now let's take a look at your graphics card wish list:

I would go for either a) or e). Both cards share the same Radeon X1600XT chipset, which features very good anisotropic filtering and has excellent DirectX 9 support. Don't buy an outdated card using an X800 or X850 chipset, they only support pixel and vertexshader 2.0.

Just take a look at my homepage: www.odatec.de and give me a call. I can give you some hints for free, what to buy or I can sell you what you need with a special "Purebasic User" discount

va!n · Post by **va!n** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 10:31 pm

@7900
Thanks for your reply. But i would never again use NVIDIA! I tried some NVIDIA cards in the past and i was never happy with its results. ATI, when dreams comes true ^^ So my choise is just only ATi

@THCM:
Thanks for the detailed information. as you may see, i dont know a lot about whats in/out in the graphiccard sector. people could tell me a lot and sell me possible crap - i dont hope so. Btw, i own an ASUS A8V Deluxe board here and i am think to buy following board with PCI-E support.

ASUS A8V-E SE == This supports PCI-E cards and i think its a good choice.

Edit:
@THCM: if you can give me some tips how to OC my actual config/CPU to something like 2,2 - 2,5 Ghz it would be great ^^ thx in advance

THCM · Post by **THCM** » Tue Jun 06, 2006 11:18 pm

I wouldn't buy a board using a Via-Chipset. The board doesn't support SATA2 harddisks and it could be possible, that it even can't recognize SATA2 harddisks. If you want a top performer, with good data-troughput, I definitely would buy a board with nvidia nForce 4 Ultra chipset! You don't need a driverdisk to install your OS onto a SATA-harddisk and the overall throughput of the chipset is much larger (USB, Lan and Diskperformance).

Do you want to oc your existing system? What revision has your Asus A8V-Deluxe board? As far as i know only rev 2.0 boards have a full working PCI and AGP lock! To give you some tips to overclock your system, I need more info about your existing config: CPU, CPU-Cooler, Case (fans), system memory, powersupply etc.

And always remember: Less is more and nothing is more important than a rockstable 24/7 working pc. An overclock of 10-20% is easy to do.

If you want, I can give you more info via pm, msn, mail or phone and it'
s much easier for me to speak/write in german!

Rescator · Post by **Rescator** » Thu Jun 08, 2006 9:05 pm

ASUS 939 board and an AMD 64 bit CPU

You might wat to take a look at the new AM2 socket boards and AM2 AMD cpu's.
As far as I can tell from stores here the price is pretty much the same as socket 939.
And AM2 is the new replacemet for 939, and finaly allows use of DDR2 ram with AMD cpu's. (AM2 cpu's obviously)

Num3 · Post by **Num3** » Thu Jun 08, 2006 10:29 pm

Get a GF 6600 GT
3dMark2001SE -> 15000 ! (normal goes for 4000)
Aquamark 3 -> 48000 ! (max was 20.000)

Doom3 runs at 60Fps all on @ 1024x768x32 !!!

Muahaha, this board is a monster, and it's only a mid-range one!