AGP 4X Video Cards

[Juiblex79]

I currently have a Standard Geforce 3 Card, ASUS V8200 Deluxe, with 64MB of RAM. I am looking to upgrade this card soon because I am starting to see some serious slow down in some on the games I am getting, more specifically Knights of the Old Republic. My motherboard only supports AGP 4X but now days all the newer cards are 8X. Is there any major performance draw backs using 4X meaning that if I got the best of the best video card it would still be no better then a cheaper one because of the 4X bottle neck. I just would like to know so I don't waste a lot of money getting a good video card that wont perform as well as a cheaper one due to this limitation.
One last note I have AGP 4X because I wanted a board that supported 2 CPUs and I am not planning on changing my board just to get 8X.
Thanks in advance for any help.;)

[plague]

I still have a board with only AGP 4X and I just got an 8X Radeon 9800pro. It works fine, the performance increase from 4X to 8X is not very significant, you probably wouldn't even notice a difference.


Edit: hahahaha, I'm an idiot because I just went to check Epox's site to see if my mobo supported 8X and it does, even though I've been running it at 4X thinking that that was all I had. Anyway, it's been running at 4X and it does work fine.

[Juiblex79]

LOL

If you have a chance could you run a benchmark before and after you change from 4X to 8X. It will probably be small but I am just curious, if its no trouble.

[plague]

sure I'll do it tonight after work for you.

[Juiblex79]

Cool thanks. :)

[JCLW]

AGP 4x will work fine for you.

I still use AGP 2x.

[Juiblex79]

Makes me wonder why they are making PCI Express for video cards if AGP 4X is enough and having 8X hardly even helps.

[JCLW]

It's cheaper to make the motherboards (less traces = less layers = less cost). Same with Serial ATA, it doesn't make any existing drives faster, but it reduces traces, makes cabling easier, and provides bandwidth for the future. IMHO it's a move to stay ahead of the game.

With everything else going PCI-Express you might as well make the video card PCI-Express as well - instead of having both PCI-Express and AGP buses.

[Juiblex79]

I though PCI Express was only going to be for the video card, I didnt know that they were changing every slot to PCI express, so now I will have to upgrade my Sound card, Network Card, and anything else that was just PCI?

[plague]

Well I changed it, so here's what I got.

Fresh reboot still at 4X: 5545 in 3DMark03

Rebooted and switched to 8X: 5554 in 3DMark03


So there you have it, 9 more points.. not too impressive

[JCLW]

Originally posted by Juiblex79
I though PCI Express was only going to be for the video card, I didnt know that they were changing every slot to PCI express, so now I will have to upgrade my Sound card, Network Card, and anything else that was just PCI?
At first boards will have both, like the ISA -> PCI migration. My workstation still has two ISA slots.

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.html?i=1830&p=8

That's a decent article to read, that page has pics to an intel refernce design. Note the size of the x1 slots - they only have about 20 connectors.

[Juiblex79]

Thanks all for the info. :)