• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

AGP versus PCI-E

N

netsider

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 12, 2004
Messages
466
I have a dual Xeon processor system with an AGP slot, and currently have a radeon HD 3850 in it. I recently built another system with a Pentium D 820 (Dual Core 2.80 Ghz) in it. I was wondering if I should just sell my old 3850 with the Xeon system. Does PCI-E have a MUCH bigger advantage over AGP (Like as if I just got the same 3850 card, but in PCI-E flavor)? Both systems have SATA Raid (Raid 0 with just two 80GB drives) also. I read that AGP has a transfer rate of around 2 GB/s. I'm not sure what the transfer rate is for PCI-E but i'm guessing it's much higher than that. But you would also have to take into account that my dual Xeons have two logical processors per core... so it's almost like having a Quad-core system if hyperthreading is enabled. The Pentium D system doesn't have hyperthreading (Either the processor or the motherboard isn't capable of it... not sure which, if not both)

Which one would perform better? I'm kinda in a dilemma on deciding. Thanks guys. :confused:
 
(sorry to just post this right now) I forgot to mention that the Pentium D system has a PCI-E slot.. if anybody didn't gather that already ;) :p
 
I'm pretty sure an HD 3850 is bottlenecked by the AGP bus.

EDIT: looked it up a bit because I was interested. The AGP version is slightly slower than the PCI-E version but there isn't a drastic difference from what I am reading.
 
The 3850 was the fastest card made for agp. Any semi modern pci-e card like a 4850 or gts260 will blow it out of the water.

However if you plan on just buying a pci-express 3850 you won't really see an improvement.

It also depends on the games. If you are playing games like Supreme commander the extra cpu cores help out a ton.

It maybe time to sell them both and build a new system, You could build a decent AM3 socket build for $500. Or if your mobo supports it getting rid of that old pentium D and picking up something like an e5200 for $60 would be much faster. Unfortunately Both of your current systems have some pretty major bottlenecks be it agp or the Pentium D
 
PCI-e cards vs AGP cards with the same chipset, the PCI-e will be much faster. There is a "bridge" chip that translates the agp instructions to the video card's GPU, which slows things down. I guess the key question is do you do heavy graphics like cad, video processing or gaming? Then it would be definitely worth going to PCI-e, but I would not bother with another 3850 when 48xx cards are so cheap, or even a 5770. Good luck!
 
I guess that pretty much answers it. I'll be selling my dual Xeon system sometime soon along with the HD 3850 and just sticking with my Pentium D system. Plus the Xeon system (Dell Precision) has a HUGE case.. which I really don't care for.
 
The reality of it is you shouldnt be asking "does agp bottleneck me", but instead ask "Do they make AGP cards anymore?".
 
I don't think AGP would be that much of a bottleneck for that specific card. However, AGP cards generally are valued higher for the same performance than PCI-E. Your card is worth some odd 60-70 on fleabay, so you could turn that around and get something like an 8800GT at no extra cost. You can probably get a little something out of your pentium D and RAM as well, as both DDR and DDR2 have pretty solid prices right now, and DDR3 seems to be dropping a little.
 
the agp will not seriously bottle neck the 3870 or a 4670, the loss is only a few percent.

As others have said, sell the AGP card, they are still worth decent money, as it is one of the only 2 cards that will run modern dx 10 effects on an older system, and just do a complete rebuild
 
The AGP 3850 will definitely be worth quite a bit more than it's PCI-E brethren. Since it is the fastest AGP card available (I did not verify this claim, just going by what's said here) it's a great upgrade for people who are unable to give up their 754/939 systems.

I'll also chime in and suggest a whole platform upgrade is definitely consideration worthy. If you look at this Techreport review The Pentium 4 is at the bottom of the pack (in all areas: efficiency/heat/power consumption/performance per watt/cores). The Pentium D is based off the same core. All modern CPUs, even the damn cheap Athlon X4's lay waste... But if you're satisfied with the current performance of the system then please ignore this paragraph.
 
Ronbo said:
PCI-e cards vs AGP cards with the same chipset, the PCI-e will be much faster. There is a "bridge" chip that translates the agp instructions to the video card's GPU, which slows things down. I guess the key question is do you do heavy graphics like cad, video processing or gaming? Then it would be definitely worth going to PCI-e, but I would not bother with another 3850 when 48xx cards are so cheap, or even a 5770. Good luck!
Click to expand...

In fact, the Radeon 9xxx series on the ATi side and the GeForce 6800 GT on the NVIDIA side were the last GPUs that were native AGP parts. Early PCI-e versions of the 6800 GT used a "bridge" chip that translated the PCI-e instructions to the GPU. ATi did a similar thing to its 9600 PRO to create its X600 for PCI-e.
 
netsider said:
I have a dual Xeon processor system with an AGP slot, and currently have a radeon HD 3850 in it. I recently built another system with a Pentium D 820 (Dual Core 2.80 Ghz) in it. I was wondering if I should just sell my old 3850 with the Xeon system. Does PCI-E have a MUCH bigger advantage over AGP (Like as if I just got the same 3850 card, but in PCI-E flavor)? Both systems have SATA Raid (Raid 0 with just two 80GB drives) also. I read that AGP has a transfer rate of around 2 GB/s. I'm not sure what the transfer rate is for PCI-E but i'm guessing it's much higher than that. But you would also have to take into account that my dual Xeons have two logical processors per core... so it's almost like having a Quad-core system if hyperthreading is enabled. The Pentium D system doesn't have hyperthreading (Either the processor or the motherboard isn't capable of it... not sure which, if not both)

Which one would perform better? I'm kinda in a dilemma on deciding. Thanks guys. :confused:
Click to expand...



its not almost like having a quad core. the pentium D is severly slow compared to current processors.. How much money are you working with? whats your budget.. i can help you find good prices.
 
Alright... thanks guys. I think I'll take the option of upgrading to 4 gigs of ram and swapping the pentium D out for a Core 2 Duo. Thanks again for all who posted.
 
And I meant that my dual Xeon with hyperthreading was "almost like" having a quad core system, as XP looked at it as 4 logical processors... I know it's not the same, but thats kinda how I looked at it. My bad.
 
AGP wont be a noticeable bottleneck for a card that old/slow, but will be for anything faster.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top