Why bother with AGP?

puppetzz said:
Since I have socket 939 already I just need to make a mobo swap. Can anyone find me a cheap $60 mobo with a $120 PCI-E card to go along with it?
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My Epox 939 board was $75 - Epox is great for bargain overclocking.

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16813123258

And the 7600GT is the best $100 card, while the 7900GS is $150. I'd stretch for the 7900GS, it's a killer card, especially if you overclock it.
 
Dual cores are the wave of the future. You'll see quad cores by end of 2007. So just hold on and wait.

And besides my AMD 64 3500+(neo 2), 2 gigs ram, and radeon 800 are just fine.

A 9500pro agp with 512 would delay a MAJOR upgrade for about 1 1/2 years. Just in time to buy a cheap dual core or a quad core.

I think that most of us don't do minor small upgrades. we tend to do the all (most) or nothing route.

And i need to see a 50% improvement in CPU and graphics to justify the upgrade. Right now i think were up to 4800 but i could be wrong.
 
SkullE said:
Dual cores are the wave of the future. You'll see quad cores by end of 2007. So just hold on and wait.
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Humbug dude... if we all waited for the "next wave" we'd never upgrade. "Wait for conroe", now it's "wait for quad core" and "wait for vista/dx10".

I just really don't like that logic at all, ESPECIALLY when the purpose of this thread is bitching about how much it would cost to adopt a newer standard right now... can you imagine the prices of quadcore + ddr7 at the end of 2007? Anyone bitching in THIS thread isn't going to give 2 shits about quadcore and ddr7 by then... We'll be adopting conroe and ddr2 + 8800gtx ;)
 
I dont know why people argue against people who want the most out of their system. Some might not have cash comin out their a$$. :)

I have a Pentium d 915, 2gb ddr, X800 agp. It plays BF2, BF2, call of duty, etc just fine, no hiccups on 1280x1024(19" lcd). I would like to buy the motherboard that has the ddr2/pci-e/agp/ddr (asrock one) that way i can upgrade as I get the money to do so. The motherboard is like $65.00 and i can use all my old stuff.

A 6300 is about $180, 2gb DDR2 is about $220, video card is about $250 pci-e, m/b is about $50-200 for the newer stuff.

Now if i put a faster video card in mine i can play game with 4x or 6x AA? Which really doesnt get me more playablility but eye candy, but is only a $150-$250 dollar option.

I have 3 kids and am a stay at home dad, so shelling out $1000 just to have new is not really an option.

Cant we all get along! Dont pick on the people with no to low money!! :cool:
 
You know what I would do if I had a AGP system?

I would just sell the computer all together and buy those lower end athlon system from Dell or HP... They have bargains for a measly $250-$300 computers that has PCI-X ready... Or even a x2 if you happen to land on a gold mine...
 
Marvelous said:
You know what I would do if I had a AGP system?

I would just sell the computer all together and buy those lower end athlon system from Dell or HP... They have bargains for a measly $250-$300 computers that has PCI-X ready... Or even a x2 if you happen to land on a gold mine...
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I think you mean PCI-E, not PCI-X.
 
I am in the process of replacing my 3+ year old Athlon XP 1700+ (T-bred B) based HTPC with a new AMD AM2 X2 4200+ based system because I wanted to support all the PureVideo features, and no AGP cards do that. I am also building this new machine to be silent (even by SilentPCReview standards).

I wish there was an AGP card that supported all the PureVideo features, but there wasn't, so I bit the bullet and upgraded the whole machine. I had to buy a PSU, Mobo, RAM, CPU, and Videocard. As a benefit, I get a machine that is now HD-DVD and Blu-Ray ready that shouldn't need replacing for another 3+ years, and it's going to be quiet.

If you're just playing games (not trying to find those elusive 2 PureVideo features), the newer AGP cards will be an improvement, but you're likely just extending the life of your machine a year or so, whereas buying a new machine might cover you for the next 3 years.

On a related note, I'm not sure if I should admit that my main PC is almost 4 years old and I have no intentions of replacing it any time soon (3.06 P4 HT with an *gasp* AGP slot).
 
I'm still hanging onto my AGP rig (below)
I can still play all the latest games, but my days are numbered.
 
Marvelous said:
You know what I would do if I had a AGP system?

I would just sell the computer all together and buy those lower end athlon system from Dell or HP... They have bargains for a measly $250-$300 computers that has PCI-X ready... Or even a x2 if you happen to land on a gold mine...
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Then you are absolutely out of your mind. You're saying to gain a slot for a card that can be gotten in AGP, you'll sacrifice top of the line parts and receive a bottom of the barrel thrown together white box that will hold back whatever card you buy even more than the AGP bus would have?

This is the mentality. Case closed.
 
Anyone with a s754 or s939 computer should probably just make a lateral move to PCIe rather than buy another AGP card. The X1950Pro in PCIe is ~$200 and in AGP is ~$250. So if you take that $50 savings and put it in a new motherboard (plus selling your old one for $30 or so in the FS/FT threads), you have $80 to buy a new motherboards with. $80 will buy you a lot of motherboard in s754/s939 these days. The only good reason for those people not to move to PCIe is because they don't want the hassle of swapping out motherboards.

Socket A and s478 are a little different. If I was set on keeping my computer, I'd probably do an AGP upgrade, but I'd take a good long look at whether or not a whole computer upgrade would be a better solution.
 
Bah, what games justify the upgrade???

Ive got a socket 754 amd 3200+, 1gb ram and an x800xl and I have no complaints whatsoever.

When a game comes out worth upgrading for, I'm all for it. In the meantime, my ancient box runs CS and WOW just fine....

as for the OP question? I dropped $100 into the AGP x800xl (refurbed on ati.com) and feel I have extended the life of my machine by at least a year or 2.......especially considering the void of decent new games out there (imho anyway.) It was either that or throw $$ into mobo, proc, vid card, ram etc etc.

For my personal use, the agp upgrade was the best bang for my buck. I'm not a tightwad, and can certainly afford any system I want at this point. I just don't see the need considering what's out there.....
 
jflail2 said:
Bah, what games justify the upgrade???

Ive got a socket 754 amd 3200+, 1gb ram and an x800xl and I have no complaints whatsoever.

When a game comes out worth upgrading for, I'm all for it. In the meantime, my ancient box runs CS and WOW just fine....

as for the OP question? I dropped $100 into the AGP x800xl (refurbed on ati.com) and feel I have extended the life of my machine by at least a year or 2.......especially considering the void of decent new games out there (imho anyway.) It was either that or throw $$ into mobo, proc, vid card, ram etc etc.

For my personal use, the agp upgrade was the best bang for my buck. I'm not a tightwad, and can certainly afford any system I want at this point. I just don't see the need considering what's out there.....
Click to expand...

It's not so much the upgrade now, but later. It might be worth throwing in something like a 8600GT when they come out rather than upgrading the whole thing, if you made the lateral move to PCIe. $100 for an AGP X800XL is a good deal too though. I wouldn't complain about that ;).
 
jflail2 said:
Bah, what games justify the upgrade???

Ive got a socket 754 amd 3200+, 1gb ram and an x800xl and I have no complaints whatsoever.
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My x800xt was just fine til I got a widescreen LCD - then at 1680 x 1050 games ran like crap, so I had to upgrade.

The x800 series is fine at 1280 x 1024, but above that you have to run 0xAA in newer games, or the framerate is marginal.
 
Why upgrade?

because your idea of "just fine" is "crap" to me, every one has preferences, some people are happy at 1024 x 768 with no eye candy, some people like the visual along with the game and wnat to enjoy it.

same people who buy HD tv's and those who keep their 15 year old CRT tv's.

to each their own, what is fine to you is not fine to someone else and vice versa.
 
Count me in the slot for not wanting to shell out the $$ for a complete system upgrade.

My specs:
P4 2.8GHz Northwood S478, oc'd to 3.23GHz
MSI Neo LSR
1 GB Corsair DDR-500
GeForce 6800GT AGP
50" Sony LCD TV
2x 10K Raptors in RAID-0
200GB & 300GB PATA drive
Auzentech 7.1 X-Plosion Sound
8x/32x/40x DVDRW/CDRW

Formerly my gaming rig, it's now my HTPC, which I play Quake 4, Oblivion, Prey and HMM V. (How could you not on a screen that big?) I also rip my growing DVD collection onto the 200 & 300 GB drives for playback in Media Center with the My Movies plugin, while my girls record their favorite shows to the RAID-0 (C:\) drive, a space-eater in it's own right.

On the technical side, the 10K SATA I Raptors have a bridge chip, similar to the solution provided for newer AGP cards, to translate from the SATA interface to the PATA controller interface that is native on the Gen I SATA drives (Sorry, I don't have a reference website for where I read that) - meaning even though I'm using SATA, I'm getting PATA performance out of my RAID-0 drives. Newer generation Raptor drives (SATA II) don't have this limitation, and are obviously much faster.

My two issue right now are HD space, and speed in games. My 300GB has been full of DVD's for months and my 200GB has already pushed out a few games that I preloaded off the CD's in favor of DVD's recently added to the collection.

Gaming on the 6800GT is good, but it's starting to show it's age. I have it oc'd to 405/1.95 now and it's not a really noticeable improvement. The X1950Pro AGP would probably double my game performance, but then the bottleneck becomes the processor without an increased overclock to 3.4 to 3.6.

My space needs are double, if not triple the hard disk storage space. At least two 500GB drives, preferably dual 750's for movie/data storage, and I'd also like to see a 300GB RAID-0 for C:\ for more recorded TV storage.

Throw in a new case (the Zalman HD160XT is on my dream list), while I'm at it. The Antec Overture that I have now is butt-fugly in my living room.

So...

On one hand, I see absolutely no point in upgrading piecemeal - a little here, a little there - because I'd end up spending more in the long run to get to the same point in performance and space (read: goals) that I had when I decided to upgrade.

On the other hand, spending $250 for the X1950Pro AGP and possibly a new Asus P4C800 board to squeeze one, maybe two, more years out of my existing system is much more realistic than doing a completely new system build for about $3,500.00. There's your answer about "why bother with AGP".

This is why I'm on the fence about the x1950Pro AGP. It'll give me roughly 30-40% faster peformance in games, but does absolutely nothing for the rest of the system. I don't play games that much anymore (having to compete with the kids for the TV), but when I do, the stuttering is an irritation.

I think my processor and memory still have some life left in them. Right now, I think my MSI board is holding me back from anthing more than 3.2GHz. An Asus P4C800 would probably fix that and get me to 3.4 or 3.6 with good air cooling, but there's the associated cost, and while I'm at it I might as well go for the x1950Pro AGP.

If I ever come to the conclusion that I'll never have the $3-4000 to build HTPC ver. 2, then I'll probably bleed my processor and memory for all they've got for the next year or two and go AGP one last time Eventually though, I have to call it and spend the big bucks for a complete system re-do. Right now: A little performance boost now or a great BIG one later? :confused:

*sigh* Decisions, decisions....
 
It really depends
One week ago, I still HATE about people asking about " Is XXX has an AGP version?"
But when it came to you... hehe... things become more sophisticate and interesting.

My friend came to me about upgrade his system
What he has is :
CPU: Athlon XP 3200+ (actually 2500+ oc 200FSB)
MB: MSI KT6 Delta
RAM: Kingston DDR 400 512MB x2, 1G total
VGA: MSI GF FX 5900XT
HDD: Quantum Fireball AS 60G
OD*: Teac W540E + Asus DV-616 (OD: Optic drive)
Power: Delta 350W
Moniter: Viewsonic P75f

He want to play "Rise of Legends" with smooth and splendid
Now I started to thank even kneel on an ATI X1950Pro AGP ($ 260)

Actually, it is not totally $$ problem...
E6300 ($190)+ 1G DDR2 800 ($110) + a P965 MB ($110) + X1950 ($ 220)
Are still enough for a good 350W PSU
And it is not $730 vs $270,
you can sell the old one with about $300 and
get a 250G HDD + DVR + decent 500W + decent aluminum Case,
makes it became another $730 vs $270

Now, An extra $ 460 for a decent and brand new system looks attractive
But, $270 can solve the poor graphic performance problem for a long time since he just have a good 17" CRT,
though XP 3200 + can not pup up X1950 Pro to its expected performance, and may not even closer
yet it DID guarentee a smooth play exp even with 4xAA and 16xHQAF for a long timev
( 17" CRT just suit 1024x768, 1280x1024 max it...although p75f can go up to 1920x1440, yet it is not practical)
And for the rest part, since he seldom encoding media,
So HDD insufficiency can simply solved by just buying another behemoth, DV-R is simply too.

There lies no CORRECT answer for this
since extra 460 bucks do look good, however,
we all know this one can live NO LONGER than the former platform
if we are talking about gaming

On the other hand, The extra 460 buck DID guarentee a new system
All within warrenty, all are brand new,
we don't need worry about the aging, no warrent components(about 3years)
that may be out of order in every single day, and it only requires 1 malfunction
to push him move toward a new platform

So... it really depend
 
I think what pisses me off the most is I finally upgraded to socket 939 and PCI-E and now they are jumping ship on 939 and are already planning to axe out AM2. What the fuck is really going on? They dropped X2's for 939 faster than I can say asshole. Now all I can get is a 4600 for 250 bucks. I'm not upgrading again, fuck that. I'll go intel before I upgrade another AMD motherboard.
 
bboynitrous said:
I think what pisses me off the most is I finally upgraded to socket 939 and PCI-E and now they are jumping ship on 939 and are already planning to axe out AM2. What the fuck is really going on? They dropped X2's for 939 faster than I can say asshole. Now all I can get is a 4600 for 250 bucks. I'm not upgrading again, fuck that. I'll go intel before I upgrade another AMD motherboard.
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lol, intel changes chipsets requirements constantly.
 
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