Let AnandTech Members voices be heard

[Regs]

Nvidia wants to know how much demand there is for the 7800's in AGP. So let them know!
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Sample Letter:

I like to express my gratitude for your excellent services providing us world leading computer merchandise and technology. However, I will like to inform you that I will not be planning on purchasing a PCI-E capable motherboard anytime soon and I would be very grateful to see an Nvidia 7800 series class video card on an AGP platform.

Thank you for your time!
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E-Mail Links:

nzone@nvidia.com

sales@bfgtech.com

Sales@EVGA.com

Gigabyte

XFX

 

[McArra]

Good idea. A shame that I think I'm going to skip this round

 

[ryanv12]

I would like to see an AGP part. I mean, PCI-E, yeah...but the same processors fit in all 939 motherboards, AGP or PCI-E. I certainly don't want to change my motherboard and have to reinstall everything in a few months just to upgrade my video card, and I'm going to have as fast of a processor as any PCI-E motherboard can handle. I'm going to send an email.

 

[Regs]

Originally posted by: ryanv12
I would like to see an AGP part. I mean, PCI-E, yeah...but the same processors fit in all 939 motherboards, AGP or PCI-E. I certainly don't want to change my motherboard and have to reinstall everything in a few months just to upgrade my video card, and I'm going to have as fast of a processor as any PCI-E motherboard can handle. I'm going to send an email.

Thank you!

Poll added.

 

[Ackmed]

These never work. There are plenty of fast cards for AGP already. Time to upgrade, and get it over with.

 

[Schadenfroh]

/signed, i would love to see continued support of the AGP since i own an nvidia nforce3 ultra

 

[Xentropy]

If you're willing to drop $600 for a card, why aren't you willing to go PCI-E? It seems a bit odd to me.

Now if when the rest of the 7800-line comes out even the midrange doesn't have AGP variants, I'll be signing the petition right along with you. High-end has no need for AGP versions anymore, but midrange should for at least another 2-3 years.

 

[n yusef]

Originally posted by: Xentropy
If you're willing to drop $600 for a card, why aren't you willing to go PCI-E? It seems a bit odd to me.

Now if when the rest of the 7800-line comes out even the midrange doesn't have AGP variants, I'll be signing the petition right along with you. High-end has no need for AGP versions anymore, but midrange should for at least another 2-3 years.

I agree. If it was a <$400 card, I would sign the petition, but for $600, you can at least spend the $90-150 on an nForce4 mobo.

EDIT: Fixed grammar.

 

[Grimbor]

You can already get a good PCIe MB new for $60 and a refurbed for $45 and prices are dropping still. I can understand if this was a constant problem causing users to be forced to update a major component every several months. But, the AGP to PCIe switch over is a once every several year occurance and it is relatively cheap to do. If your using an older CPU that dosen't support the PCIe boards, then yeah, your looking at a bigger cost, but this is a minority of people buying the high end cards, at least for now.

The reason I am against this drive is because even if they made more money selling AGP varieties of the new cards, the fact they are still having to produce, box and market 2 types of each card will inflate the cost of the PCIe cards because of stocking shortages at vendors who might understock PCIe, and more limited the mass production of mid range PCIe cards. It also seems that the 512 variety of the 7800 benefits from PCIe in utilizing all it's capacity. Having to support AGP may well force Nvidia and ATI to have to artifically slow down on technology improvments that might help PCIe but not AGP.

I would suggest anyone going for this gen to bite the bullet and get a cheap PCIe MB or stick longer with last generation which is just fine for quite a while still.

 

[ryanv12]

All I want is for them to release AGP when they do a price drop. I'm not going to spend $600, but I would likely purchase one of these cards later.

Also, it's inconveinent to have to change your motherboard and then watch Windows go BSOD, especially if you already have a nice AGP motherboard.

 

[Xentropy]

Originally posted by: ryanv12
All I want is for them to release AGP when they do a price drop. I'm not going to spend $600, but I would likely purchase one of these cards later.

Well, later, there'll likely be a 7800NU or 7800GT which costs $300-$400 and comes in AGP form. The GTX doesn't belong in an AGP system, however, at least according to nVidia marketing. As Grimbor said, it costs money to market, track, ship, sell, create new box art, etc. for a new version of the same part. The high-end AGP market is a niche one at this time as the majority of the high-end is now PCI-E. Upper midrange will still have AGP for a while, so when the upper-midrange 7800GT or midrange 7800NU come out, I hope they're in AGP (so people will stop complaining if nothing else).

 

[linkgoron]

There is close to no demand for a 7800GTX on a AGP platform. A person that can buy a 600$ Video Card most likely has a MB with PCI-E, or has enough money to one. Lots of players in games say that the 5200 is good enough, or some think that the 9800pro is the best card, most high-end PCs are on 939 Nforce 4 boards.

 

[xtknight]

Even though I have PCI-E, I will do it on behalf of those still with AGP.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

There's no AGP platform that support CPUs fast enough for the flagship parts, get a grip guys. If the card is CPU bottle necked, why buy the card? Not even the PCI-e platforms are fast enough yet (unless dualcore is quickly taken advantage of). You'll need to upgrade, otherwise you'll have to live with middle of the road performance

 

[Regs]

Originally posted by: bunnyfubbles
There's no AGP platform that support CPUs fast enough for the flagship parts, get a grip guys. If the card is CPU bottle necked, why buy the card? Not even the PCI-e platforms are fast enough yet (unless dualcore is quickly taken advantage of). You'll need to upgrade, otherwise you'll have to live with middle of the road performance

What? The X2 4400 works on my AGP 939. What else do you want?

 

[Regs]

Originally posted by: linkgoron
There is close to no demand for a 7800GTX on a AGP platform. A person that can buy a 600$ Video Card most likely has a MB with PCI-E, or has enough money to one. Lots of players in games say that the 5200 is good enough, or some think that the 9800pro is the best card, most high-end PCs are on 939 Nforce 4 boards.

Maybe I'm just lazy to rip out my "old" 939 that came out 6 months ago.

 

[scheibler4]

Definately will not be going pci-e x16 or even s939 for that matter until there is a large performance and bang for the buck over a s754 rig with a nice high end agp 8x card. The 7800 would be awsome if ti were agp....DEFINATELY would buy one!

 

[Ronin]

scheibler, might want to do some more research. The mem controller on the 939's alone makes a huge difference.

I'll take a 4000+ over your NC any day. (or any of the FX's, for that matter).

 

[chaonatic]

Everybody screams "Upgrade, upgrade, it's not that big an expendature", but for some of us it is. Notably, those of us with socket 940 FX chips. Upgrade for me would mean: New mobo, CPU, RAM, Sound Card and Video Card(s). Basically a whole new system to supplant my, literally, one year old pc. I bet you that with an FX-51 and the 2GB RAM and an AGP variant of the 7800 line of cards, I would see significant performance gains, even over my 6800 Ultra. Enough so to warrant the purchase of said vaporware.

I think it's waaay too early in the game to totally shutout the AGP market. At least give us one more year (or one more generation of chip) to upgrade to PCIe, just until AMD comes out with dual core chips with DDR2 memory controllers. That's the time to upgrade, a whole new RAM, new mobo archetecture and hopefully new sound card chip (Creative's X-Fi).

 

[fstime]

Originally posted by: Ronin
scheibler, might want to do some more research. The mem controller on the 939's alone makes a huge difference.

I'll take a 4000+ over your NC any day. (or any of the FX's, for that matter).

Wow,

You do know, your memory controller on the 939 only adds a ~3% performance boost.

DC doesnt make much difference on the a64, it will on intel systems though.

s754 is just as good as s939, they both offer pci-e, I dont think 754 has SLi yet.

Maybe if you want to spend a ton of cash on dual core, then 939 is probably for you.

754 has a lot of good deals, 3400+ (rebadged FX-53).

 

[Grimbor]

Another bonus of PCIe only 7800 cards is all the people who buy them off of places like Newegg without doing any research and then sending them back. That's how I got my 6600 for $60 and hopefully in a short while will get a 7800 or same gen card for a good price.

 

[Ronin]

Originally posted by: BouZouki

Originally posted by: Ronin
scheibler, might want to do some more research. The mem controller on the 939's alone makes a huge difference.

I'll take a 4000+ over your NC any day. (or any of the FX's, for that matter).

Wow,

You do know, your memory controller on the 939 only adds a ~3% performance boost.

DC doesnt make much difference on the a64, it will on intel systems though.

s754 is just as good as s939, they both offer pci-e, I dont think 754 has SLi yet.

Maybe if you want to spend a ton of cash on dual core, then 939 is probably for you.

754 has a lot of good deals, 3400+ (rebadged FX-53).

I was running a 3400+ before my FX55 (and I was running my 3400+ at 2.5GHz). I saw a noticeable increase in performance across the board. It's not just about the mem controller, and saying that the 754 is par with the 939 is rubbish.

 

[imported_humey]

Ackmed, BULLSH1T, you think we all gonna ditch mobos as of agpon them, i spent £1000's on this rig and its not my time for AMD64bit yet as i got more power than most them users do at current time and not all apps are running in 64bit XP inc drivers, and i seen this o/s well before public did.

AGP will not be dead soon, you will get new cards with it.

The n00bs that are telling others to upgrade to new mobos as its not to expensive, please add on price of a mid to top model AMD 64 cpu and in some cases new memory depending on users current speed ram, then a ATX 2.0 PSU aswell to round it of.

 

[Grimbor]

Originally posted by: humey
Ackmed, BULLSH1T, you think we all gonna ditch mobos as of agpon them, i spent £1000's on this rig and its not my time for AMD64bit yet as i got more power than most them users do at current time and not all apps are running in 64bit XP inc drivers, and i seen this o/s well before public did.

AGP will not be dead soon, you will get new cards with it.

The n00bs that are telling others to upgrade to new mobos as its not to expensive, please add on price of a mid to top model AMD 64 cpu and in some cases new memory depending on users current speed ram, then a ATX 2.0 PSU aswell to round it of.

Well, I was talking more to people who have 939 systems already with a CPU that is good when I recommended changing the MB out from AGP to PCIe. They should already have pc3200 DDR and you do not need a ATX 2.0 PSU to run the boards, you don't even need to hook up an adapter for the PSU as they work just fine without one.

 

[fstime]

I'm not buying it.

n the final analysis, current socket 754 and socket 940 users won't see gain any real value from "upgrading" to socket 939. The new addition of a dual channel memory controller for unbuffered DDR has no doubt given the Athlon 64 line a small performance increase, but it may not be as much as people had been expecting. The main advantages to socket 939 will be the convergence of the Athlon 64 desktop platform, the ability to use unbuffered RAM in conjunction with high end desktop processors, and the warm feeling that comes from knowing there's quite a lot of memory bandwidth under the hood with a dual channel memory controller on die.

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/derek%20939%20sockets_05310440551/2347.png

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/derek%20939%20sockets_05310440551/2348.png


There is no reason for a s754 user to go s939 because the performance incress is not worth it.

Unless you want dual core or sli, then thats another story.

Then again, if you want a 3% boost in performance due to DC, go for it.