when are the new PCI-e graphics cards (nvidia 6800 ultra and radeon x800) coming out, and what are they going to cost?
the cost wont greatly differ from their AGP equivalents when they actually become availible to buy is anyones guess, hopefully they should be filtering through in there near future
I don't even understand why anyone would want to even pay a dollar extra for a PCI express card, you're not getting any extra performance right now, because ATM, agp 8x isn't getting bottle-necked at all.
well if you have a new intel setup you dont really have a choice now do you shouldnt be more really, although SATA drives are nearly identical to their IDE counterparts and offer no performance advantage, and they are more expensive
thats false, my 10,000 rpm SATA drive is faster than my 7200 rpm IDE drive any day. The raptors, even alone, are damn fast for a non-raid set up.
yea but raptors dont have an ide counterpart do they? for example a sata DM+9 is the same speed as a ide DM+9
oh didnt read that part. oops either way, sata is a good idea, for if nothing else, much much smaller data cables.
Actually the SATA interface has the same main advantage over IDE as PCIe has over AGP, higher peak throughput. PCIe also has its own path that it doesn't share with anything else. SATA HDD's will see a huge performance increase when NCQ is finally enabled in hard drives, raptors have it but it is disabled. Unfortunately the only chipsets that support it are the 915 and 925 from intel so it will probably be quite a while before we see the benefits of it. Same thing goes for the PCIe, we still don't even use the 8x agp to its full potential, 4x agp is all we really need.
To actually answer the original question... nobody really knows. I'd imagine later this month hopefully, although apparently on the ATI side there's been a shortage of the necessary memory chips (read that somewhere, not positive). And SATA drives aren't any more expensive than PATA drives. Right now though, we're limited by the whole moving parts thing. Dunno about you but sticking my finger in a delta fan doesn't seem like a good idea, now imagine one spinning twice to three times as fast and you have the 15kRPM hard drives. Which need more power, generates more heat and really only provides faster seek times and not a huge amount more data thoroughput. Once we move to solid-state hard drives, think massive flash media with a sata-ii interface (ideally, the only ones around right now are ~3GB, $900 and made of normal ram which needs an external power source to prevent a reformat when the computer is turned off), we'll be actually using the bandwidth available. As graphics cards evolve even more, we'll need the bandwidth too. Realistically it's at least partically a marketing gimmick since as it was pointed out we'd probably be fine with AGP 4x however someone realized that if they're going to change the CPU socket type they might as well eliminate future bottlenecks.
PCIe creates a whole new, far more efficient way for the CPU, RAM and video card to communicate. It also changes the way drivers are written. Everything is optimized and far more efficient. I can't understand why people keep saying "err PCIe is a gimmick, we're not using all of AGP now anyways!" go read some nVidia or ATI developer docs, there's so much more to the world of graphics than GPU clock and some bandwidth.
Well it's not so much a lack of bandwidth on AGP, it's that you can only go in one direction at a time (or it's shared in some wierd way, something to that extent). PCIE gives it not only more bandwidth but more in both directions. Emon's quite right though. It eliminates all of these wierd bridges, extra chips, etc, and gives stuff the direct route to the hardware it needs. It's one of those things that doesn't really make sense if you don't read up on it a lot though, like why serial ATA has more bandwidth than parallel ATA. Two pairs of data lines which get ~75MB/s each on SATA versus 13 pairs on PATA which on ata/133 get a little over 10MB/s each. In all reality, just take his word for it. Anyways, if intel is going to push it, it's going to happen, and that's that. All of the OEMs do whatever intel says. Probably why the new dell systems are already available with a PCIE x800xt...
