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AGP VS. PCI ?

S

Stormwolf

Junior Member
I need some help, I'm gonna buy a new video card and
i wanna know whicj one to get. What's better, PCI or
AGP ? I heard that AGP takes up ram, is that true ?
Is it a good thing or a bad thing? anyhow, Please answer.

I'll be using a 900 mhz AMD PC. With 256 ram
I'm thinking of getting a Geforce 2 GTS 64 meg.
The Ultra seems a bit too expensive.
Any help would be appreciated.
 
I have a PIII 800 with a 64 Mb strip, and a 128 Mb strip. I have a Voodoo 3 3000, and it is PCI. Let me tell u, that with your 900 mhz system, you will be able to play anything you want to and it wont matter if it is AGP, or PCI. Both are good. I can run anything, so u shouldnt worry, and go for a cheaper card too. A Voodoo 4, or even a 3 will do ya, and they will be cheap since 3dfx is going out of business. Once they do go out, video cards will almost double in price. Im not joking, i have read the new prices soon to take effect. Unless you want to spend 200-600$$ or more on a card, just buy one now. Thats what i think anyway.
 
I say go with the agp. I dont think they make a gts in pci anyhow.Test show that agp is always faster than the pci versions anyway.Agp can transfer the data alot faster as pci still does the job but it is a big bottleneck.
 
the real agp cards (that use T+L, agp texturing, fast writes...) need AGP yes, tho there is a PCI MX (you wouldn't find me buying it). a voodoo5 does not use ANY of the above and only is inferior to the agp at VERY high resolutions (at 1280x1024 and over, by a maximum of 20% at 1600x1200) but the PCI is pretty cruddy to run at 33MHz sharing the bus with just about every other card you have.
 
If you get any board with a T&L engine (such as a GF based board or a Radeon) you should definitely get the AGP version. If you're buying a Voodoo board it really makes no difference but you should get the AGP version anyway, if only to save a PCI slot.
 
AGP 4x is 8x faster than PCI.

AGP runs at 66Mhz bus x 4 data transfers on each clk.
PCI runs at 33Mhz bus.

Is this correct?
 
AGP 4x is 8x faster than PCI.

In theory. In reality there's no performance difference betwen x4 and x2, and x2 is only slightly faster than x1.
Also as I said before, AGP is only faster than PCI if the video card has a T&L engine.

AGP runs at 66Mhz bus x 4 data transfers on each clk.

That's AGP x4.

PCI runs at 33Mhz bus. Is this correct?

Yes.
 
again, you wont notice a performance difference between agp, or pci , unless you are planning to overclock them, or if you are running a slow system. Go with the dirt cheap voodoo, and a pci will do ya fine. For performance, money ratio, you cant beat a voodoo, and PCI or not, will still meet your video needs, and then some.
 
Go with AGP just to save bandwidth on the PCI bus.

And for all you who think the AGP bus and AGP texturing have a paramount performance advantage over a video card on the PCI bus...you are wrong. Even at 4X the AGP port is still a snail compared to having all the needed textures in local video RAM.
 
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