Out with the OLD (AGP) in with New PCI-X!

[KGB1]

Seems Intel finally decided to go ahead and put in the new AGP 3.0 standard (AGP 8X), but yet around the corner and right NOW for some lucky guys with spanking new server have PCI Express (formely 3GIO) Intel wants to rid of AGP and use PCI Express for the graphics pipeline, as well as other devices also.

I've read that PCI express is BACKWARDS compatible with the PCI cards that we currently have today
(is it true?) Though I've seen pictures of the new bus and it doesnt look it.

Would it be wise to spend over 150 dollars on an AGP video card now, and a year later PCI Express comes in and just changes the graphics world upside down

. I guess no new upgrade for me for a while until PCI express comes along.

 

[aswedc]

The bandwidth advantage of PCI-X over any AGP variant will not be shown in games for many, many years. PCI video cards are still capable of producing an acceptable frame rate in the majority of situations. So there is no reason not to get an AGP video card now, except for the bragging rights of having a PCI-X video card.

 

[Soulkeeper]

Of course it's safe to buy an AGP card
especially a 150 dollar one
if you need a vid card you gotta get one
might as well get one with the longest life span
if you wanna wait over a year to get a vid card be my guest heh
i would like to see something replace PCI tho
i could use the extra brandwidth for scsi arrays and stuff mmmmm

 

[KGB1]

But Its interetsing to me to know that my Visiontek GF2MX 32MB PCI will WORK on PCI Express and probably have little to no bandwidth issues. This to me is very exciting. I am concerned also about what AMD will do with PCI Express. I mean AMD was pushing for hyper Transport, but Intel's (3 GIO) PCI X won in the end. Will the Clawhammer have a chipset utilizing this technology. I hope its royalty free for AMD to use PCI X. Considering AMD pays Intel for MMX,SSE,SSE2(soon),X86.

 

[Pariah]

"But Its interetsing to me to know that my Visiontek GF2MX 32MB PCI will WORK on PCI Express and probably have little to no bandwidth issues."

It may be compatible, but it won't fit into the slots. Any PCI slot capable of running faster than 33MHz, including PCI-X has a notch on the left side of the slot so regular 32bit/33MHz cards will not fit into it. If it did fit, the added bandwidth would do nothing and in fact would cripple every card that could run at PCI-X specs because all the cards on a given bus will run at the clockrate of the slowest card. For this reason you will see odd PCI configurations on some server boards where it will have 3 PCI-X slots all rated to run a different speeds (66MHz,100MHz,133MHz) to avoid having one card potentially cripple faster card. AGP is a more efficient design currently as it is a dedicated port, while PCI even if it is faster often is shared when multiple devices are used.

All PCI cards should be backwards compatible, however they are not all forwards compatible.

 

[boran]

ETA for PCI-X is 2004 if you're not going to upgrade your comp till 2004 (might be end 2004) then that's your problem, but I spend about 1500 ? on my comp each year to keep it somewhat up to date ...