News GeForce 7800 GS AGP

[The_Pope]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/12...e_7800_gs_agp/

[The_Pope]

My first reaction is: why spend big-ish money on a new AGP card when surely you're CPU limited on Socket 478 / 462?

According to Tim, these are the fastest CPUs you might own in an existing AGP system:

Athlon XP 3200+
Athlon 64 FX-57/X2 4800+ for S939 AGP
Athlon 64 3700+ for S754
Pentium 4 3.4GHz Northwood/Prescott (northy is faster)
you'll be lucky to be able to get the S754 CPU though, if you can't, the fastest is a Sempron 3400+ - 2GHz 256K L2 cache

So that kinda torpedoes my assumption. We know that current cards aren't really using the theoretical benefit of PCI-E over AGP, so maybe there is some logic to a quick AGP replacement...

[Bindibadgi]

Also, the AGP market is still pretty damn huge. 6800GT AGPs are going for silly money on ebay ive been told.

[The_Pope]

So it seems: within 4 seconds I found an EVGA 6800GT clocked at Ultra speeds of 400/1100mhz going for £245 / US$424!!!

[Da Dego]

hehe...I like how they offer to give you either a 7800GT or 6800GS. Hmmm...let me think about that for a minute...

[Hustler]

A 7800 AGP card would be perfect for me....if you look at my system you will see why:

Dell 8300 Dimension

3.0Ghz Northwood P4
2GB 3200 DDR Ram
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
120GB Hdrive

Now the problem being its a Dell, i.e custom Mobo,PSU,Case....so just to upgrade to PCI Express i have to buy a completely new system for the sake of improved game performance.

With a 3Ghz processor and 2GB of Ram paired with a 7800 AGP it would be powerful enough for the next 18mths or so.

I WANT A 7800AGP NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[<A88>]

Originally Posted by The_Pope

So it seems: within 4 seconds I found an EVGA 6800GT clocked at Ultra speeds of 400/1100mhz going for £245 / US$424!!!

Do those people not realise you can get 7800GTs for that price?!

<A88>

[MrWillyWonka]

It seems manufacturers are going backwards. We should be pushing for people to go to PCI-e and S939, which should lead to reduced costs. But We've got S754 mobo with PCI-e, and now a 7800 AGP version, even if the AGP market is still large, I don't think this should be happening.

[cominferya]

too little too late! building SLI rig as I type ,though I went with a pair of 512 meg 6800 ultras ,took about a month to get them ,they arrived just 4 days before the 7800 GTX release and subsequent availability. don't regret the purchase @ 1299.00 canadian per. though i was choked @ the immediate availability, no more paper launchs for Invidia, Lol. however don't see any new AGP cards being feasable for the enthusiast market so they shouldn't be priced as such, have a couple of agp rigs and they would have to be cheap cheap to convince me to upgrade from the bfg 6800 gtoc or the 6600 gtoc currently running in my lan party at home! bottleneck somewhere forsure.

[speedfreek]

Since I recently purchased a decent s754/agp system for a good price, before the 7800s came out, and the fact that im broke I think a 7800 agp would be great since a 6800 ultra is currently the best agp card and about $450 compared to some 7800s I have seen selling for much less than $300. Anyway as long as its released before tax return time it will be great.


Edit: To what bigz said, Ive had nothing but bad luck with ATI so I go with Nvidia now.

[Tim S]

Hmmm, the X850XT is the fastest AGP card around

[tank_rider]

Could be some interesting unlocking options depending on what core is used a la 6800LE etc.

I've just got a S939 AGP mobo as i seriously cant afford a new gfx card at the moment, and will be running it with an opteron, and so will have a pretty damn powerful agp system. My plan being to upgrade the mobo and gfx in about 9 months time. A 7800 on agp would bring this upgrade that little bit closer as it negates the need for a new mobo.

If we haven't reached the limit of agp yet and a 7800 wont reach it then why stop producing cards for it. All those people with dothans wanting a decent card will be happy, as will I if they come up with the goods.

[ralph.pickering]

I'd definitely be up for an 7800 AGP. And as far as I'm concerned, the fastest processors you can have in an AGP based system would be dual Opteron 280s with a decent overclock. I'm not quite there, but I only upgraded my system 11 months ago to dual xeon 3GHz cpus on an Asus NCCH-DL board, and I'm not quite ready to chuck another few hundred quid at my computer just for the sake of PCI-E. Especially as most of my work is 2D (video and sound editing) and I don't spend that much time playing games. Maybe with a 7800 AGP card in my system I might though.

[Nottheking]

Hmm... Once again, I see the effects of simply using a higher number to sell a product. People, we should be remembering that in most tests, the 7800GT barely passes the Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition, currently the best card out there for AGP. If we cut the number of pipelines down to 16, and have speeds of 375/1000MHz, what do we have left? It won't even match up to the GeForce 6800ultra, it seems, given that that card has speeds of 400/1100MHz; the few tweaks nVidia implemented in their G70 over the NV40 might make some difference, but I still see it failing to unseat the X850XT PE, which as you should remember, nearly matched up to the 6800ultra in Doom3, and in DirectX games... It utterly slaughtered nVidia's offering.

This is just like the speculation behind Diamond producing an AGP version of the X1800XL; benchmarks show that it matches up with the X850XT PE, so there's really little reason to add that to the lineup, unless it doesn't actually cost more; the advantages of SM 3.0 support, selective AA, (as well as AA that's as close to "free" as has ever been seen) and high-quality filtering might make it worthwhile to those upgrading from a much lower card, but no real reason to throw out even some of the more modest X800 cards.

And as for the feasibility of a top-end AGP card, I think some people are forgetting about those of us that got Athlon64s when they first came out; I was one of these such people, who have an AGP socket 754 board, and do not favor the idea of buying a whole new motherboard and processor whatsoever. Of course, in my full case, I would have no intent on buying any video card out there right now even if I could use it; my X800XT does pretty well on its own.

[Firehed]

It's just stupid. If you want high-end, don't do it with outdated interfaces. It would be like trying to find a USB1.1 4GB memory stick (if it wasn't backwards compatible, or even just using it on USB1.1 as it's stupidly slow).

However, I've theorized it would happen eventually. All the pictures I've seen of a 7-series board have four unused soldered holes right behind the PCIE power that are obviously where a 4-pin molex would go.

[Nottheking]

Originally Posted by Firehed

It's just stupid. If you want high-end, don't do it with outdated interfaces. It would be like trying to find a USB1.1 4GB memory stick (if it wasn't backwards compatible, or even just using it on USB1.1 as it's stupidly slow).

However, I've theorized it would happen eventually. All the pictures I've seen of a 7-series board have four unused soldered holes right behind the PCIE power that are obviously where a 4-pin molex would go.

There's a pretty big difference here. Remember that USB 1.1 is painful to use in terms of speed. And as a side note, most PC makers STILL put USB 1.1 ports on the front, which kills much of the point, forcing us to either use that port or scramble around to the back to attach it. I'm not talking about our own machines here; if we only used a single computer, we obviously would have no need for USB drives.

In almost all cases, the bandwidth of AGP isn't even close to fully used up; 2.1GB a second is plenty enough to handle sending all the data the GPU needs to render any game out there, and even if AGP video cards had 512MB, it still would take only a fraction of a second to fill up. For the most part, PCI-express has been for graphics cards, in many ways, a gimmick. The primary advantage it has brought is that the multi-lane interface has allowed for a return to 2-card setups. The extra bandwidth, as I've noted, is useless otherwise.

And as I've said before, it's not like there's a massive performance difference between the most powerful AGP cards, and the most powerful PCI-express cards; when released, the GeForce 7800GTX only posted a 20-25% increase in performance over the Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition. The 512MB version seems to have increased that only to around 50-60%. Is that really enough to demand that you immediately move over to the "next thing?" I do appreciate the benefits that PCI-e will bring, but remember what this stuff is all for: the games. Games could care less what graphics interface is availible, only what power, memory, and features are availible for its use. PCI-e brings nothing truly new to the table for them, hence, PCI-e is just as good for them as AGP.

[kickarse]

I would/did... My main rig is plenty fast cpu and ram wise... There's only so much that we can do to increase frames with just cpu and video cards... I see it as a huge upgrade if you can have an AGP 7800gs

[Kipman725]

I need to upgrade my soccet A system(s) with a new graphics card(s) so it would be great not to get raped for a 6800gt
or x850pe

[HellRazor]

Honestly depending on the cost of such a card I would seriously consider investing in it. I currently am running S754 3400+, combined with the 2 gigs of ram, the SATA drives, and all the other goodies, I'm really not in any place where I NEED to upgrade to PCI-E. Granted, the 6800 vanillia (Unlocked, and overclocked to GT speeds) does hold me back quite some, it is really the ONLY draw back of my current system. However on the other hand, I also figure its only a matter of time until I upgrade. I'm eyeing the over priced 512GTX and the FX-57 so I dunno....all boils down on how well I emerge from the holidays monitarily! In Eithercase though, I know first hand there is a market for the high end AGP cards, I work at Best Buy and people are ALWAYS asking whats the best they can get, and price really isn't an issue, so long as they don't have to replace their computers.

[Firehed]

I wasn't at all trying to say that PCIE will have a performance difference. It won't, at least nothing significant. I was saying that AGP, like USB1.1, is old tech, so let's get rid of it.

As a side note, what the hell board are you using that puts USB1.1 up front? NO computer that I've built has been that way, and anything I can remember using that had USB2.0 had it on all ports.

To each his own, but when I buy new parts, I get ones that are current. IMO anyone giving the bandwidth argument is simply trying to find a reason to hang on to AGP a little bit longer. As was noted earlier, the CPU limitation you're likely to face using an AGP board will probably negate the benefit of the upgrade by a considerable amount.