How powerfull are vanilla PCI "Old non express" gpu cards!!!

[ajaidevsingh]

I have a 7500 PCi AIW card in the heart of my HTPC and was thinking since i have to order for my 2nd PC i sould think about the HTPC also.. Since the M/B is quite low profile with only two PCi slots "one occupied by a very good SB blaster 24bit! and the other by a 7500 AIW PCi.

So, does it really matter if i upgrade the PCi card to say a Albatron 8600GT or 8500 GT will i get performance close to a say 8600 GT PCIe???? Or should i keep the 7500 AIW!!!

I plan to load up NFS HP2, NFS UG and maybe UG2 !!!

 

[adlep]

The regular PCI is limited to a max. theoretical transfer rate of 133MB per second. That is only a half of the bandwidth that is available on the AGPx1
To make the matter worst, PCI also shares bus with your IDE devices, Sound Blaster, and the Ethernet Card
Because of that, even your Radeon 7500 calculates much more than it is able to push through the PCI interface bottleneck.

If you really want to upgrade your video card, stay with the 8500GT.
8600GT in PCI flavor is an overkill and it WONT be able to provide nowhere near the performance of it's 8600GT PCI-E brother.


PCI already felt kind of slow for graphics when I started working in the field in 99...

Edit:

Found a really nice article about your question

 

[imported_Kiwi]

Hmmm? I thought that I remembered plain PCI is just 33 something, and AGP was twice that, plus the acceleration; PCIe is the one with the 133 whatever, plus acceleration . . that's the way I recall the three being related.

As to bottlenecking, improved cards newer than the Radeon 7500, up to the Geforce 6200, did gain a slight bit more performance, with that level as the cap. There were a very few Geforce 8500 PCI cards, and there were zero 8600s made for the old interface. A few 7300 GS cards were produced for PCI, but only the 6200s are still around.

AMD offers more variety, both for AGP, and for plain PCI, but the X1550 predominates.

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: ajaidevsingh
So, does it really matter if i upgrade the PCi card to say a Albatron 8600GT or 8500 GT will i get performance close to a say 8600 GT PCIe???? Or should i keep the 7500 AIW!

You're not going to get close to PCI Express no matter the GPU. The comparison isn't betweeen PCI and PCI Express but between PCI and PCI.

And yes, faster GPUs are going to be faster than slower GPUs on the same interface. GF 6200 and Radeon HD 2400 would be a significant improvement over R7500. The Albatron 8600/8500 PCI cards are going to be very pricey, most of which would be lost on the PCI interface and represent a poor value.

 

[adlep]

the HD 2400 may be a good suggestion after all.
:beer: