News AGP is back from the dead. Again.

We can't all afford £1,000+ every couple of years you know. If it weren't for the 7800GS last year I would never have been able to play Oblivion, BF2142, SupCom, etc... I'm now trying to scrimp for a full upgrade, but an 8600 AGP does sound mighty tempting. Long live AGP!

 

one thing I forgot to add earlier is this will certainly breather some life into the three older rigs sitting in a rack in my parent's basement (along with the house router/firewall)

 

don't worry agp 8x only helps with the very fastest cards for agp like 7800's and x1900's

 

My question is, how much more will these AGP boards cost over their PCI-e brethren.

I have four computers in my house that are AGP based, including my primary gaming machine. A 2.1GHz Athlon 64 with 1GB of DDR and a Radeon X1550. The motherboard is four years old, but it's still fast enough for me to run most anything I want. Bioschock is the first game I've encountered that wont run on this system.

I'm in the process of building my first PCI-e/DDR2 based system, not because my current one is too slow, but simply because I know that I'm at the point where it will cost more to upgrade the current system then to build a new one. AGP video cards are now more expensive then PCI-e.

 

Its like some sort of zombie, just keeps getting up from the dead.

I might bite but I am leaning to a whole new computer before just a new gfx card.

 

I think it's a good idea. I for one am running my previous rig as a media pc (with modern coolers it's damn quiet) and the one thing that would be nice is hardware decoding of HD material, so an older AGP card that's capable of that is a real bonus. For this application the limit of 50W of power through the slot is actually a bonus in disguise as it means less heat in the system and altogether quieter performance. Bringing modern efficiencies to an older interface platform is fine by my standards.

 

I always root for the zombies so go AGP!

 

I was in this situation for a while, but then I found a brand new DFi Infinity NF4 PCIe board for £25, no brainer upgrade really.

 

AGP lives on, hurrah!

 

argh

 

I wont have to upgrade my mobo after all.

AGP DX10 for the win

 

Well said

PCI-E 16x isn't actually a lot faster then AGP 8x (like 10-20% i think) - however, as proven with SLI, cards work fine on PCI-E 8x
The move to PCI-E was meant to be a double whammie, get rid of AGP and PCI in one go, its also a lot easier to wire with PCI-E

However, we are still stuck with both, although i don't think you can get a motherboard with AGP these days

 

Up until about 2 months ago, I was running a Dell(I know, first comp) with a AGP X8 slot, filled with an ATi(Generic) X700 PRO with 256 mb of ram, and a 3.0 ghz p4 with ht on the socket 478. I think the first game i couldn't run at min settings was crysis(that's the one to stumble upon imo). So I upgraded to the one i have in my sig. I have no qualms with AGP, but it's only been uphill since.

 

So your saying that the Geforce 9800 will be released this year?!

 

You should fix the forum link in the article... it leads only to the forum main page.

 

I think I have a celebrity stalker. This setup is perfect for me, or at least close enough. Once a component on this system goes kaputzky I will upgrade to pci-e. But until then I am riding the AGP train to the end!!!

 

I have to say it is kind of tempting... Just throw an awesome GFX card into a dying system an see what happens.

It's a lot cheaper then upgrading everything but I have to admit it is a strange move IMO.

 

While I agree with Delphium that AGP probably isn't for the uber gamer (would a hard core gamer still be running an AGP setup anyway?), I'm definitely with tank_rider on the idea of upgrading an AGP system just to give it better 2D video capabilities.

I'm currently on a Northwood (130nm) 2.8 GHz Hyperthreaded P4, with an HDTV tuner, and a GeForce 5200 FX. I built this setup in early 2004, with 512 megs of ram. I upgraded recently to 2GB...but honestly, that much ram probably wasn't really necessary with XP. I don't game, and the 5200 seemed to me like the bare-minimum at the time for what I wanted to do (HDTV watching). This rig works nicely decoding the MPEG-2 encoded 720p and 1080i broadcast TV for me (in the U.S.), and I'm very happy with it.

However, since my P4 doesn't support the extra video-decoding commands that newer processors do, and since my video card doesn't do any hardware decoding of MPEG-4 signals, I'm going to need to upgrade *if* the stupid BluRay/HDDVD format war looks stable enough (and cheap enough) for me to invest in a format. My upgrade would really only require a low-end, but current-generation video card...and that's all I should need, provided it can do all the video decoding on its own. My machine is probably fine for me for another two years or more...adding 1080p MPEG-4 playback capabilities could go a long way to making this PC perfectly fine as my main rig for an extra several years.

Sure, it might be nice to have a cutting-edge machine...but really, while a new Quad-core Core 2 Duo would surely blow my processor away in benchmarks/gaming/etc., it really wouldn't make any difference in my day-to-day stuff. Even ripping the occasional DVD or something -- it might take an hour and a half on my computer...but with Hyperthreading, I can multitask easily, so I'm not really missing anything.

 

P4 2.8C Northwood at 3.5ghz ish, 2 gig of ram and an agp 6800LE here, I'd probably welcome an nvidia 8-series card on AGP to squeeze a bit more life out of this system until I can justify building a new one .

 

Yeah...PCI-E is three years old and we're on the threshhold of PCI-E-2...

...and you still can't buy a soundcard for it

Xir