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PCI-E x 4 or AGP?

cimurray

cimurray

cimurray

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Joined
3 Feb 2008
Posts
136
My son has an Asus P4V800D-X motherboard which has both an AGP x 8 slot and a PCI-E x 16 slot limited to x 4. He currently has a Radeon 9600 installed in the AGP slot. The rest of the rig is a P4 2.6 with 1 GB RAM. Is it worth switching to a mid-range PCI-E card (say £50) and will there be much difference in performance?

Thanks to anyone who can help.
 
Since I have a PCI-E X4 slot and an 8X agp slot on my board I will tell you how it is :)

PCI-E X4 will NOT be as fast as the AGP 8X equivalent card. You WILL get slower responses/less frames. On negative side however, agp variants of the same card are more expensive than the PCI-E verisions, so factor this in. Outcome: pci-e x4 slower but cheaper.

They is about 10% performance degradation upto about an x1950xt and then performance drops of even worse if you try to use something like an 8800 series card in the PCI-E slot (i.e with a gtx you might be talking about a 25% performance hit!)

Basically if I was you, I would see how much you can sell your existing motherboard for and your cpu, and upgrade to a PCI-E 16x platform. It might not work out as expensive as you think.

Think is if you get an agp card now, it might be more difficult to sell later, although if you don't play demanding games, then it will probably be ok for another year or so. Then you'll have to sell the graphics card as well in the next system as you won't be able to use the agp in it. If you had bought an pci-e card at least you would be able to reuse it.

Matthew
 
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