Every Upgraders Quandary Now or Not?

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A

A

I currently have a Socket A Barton 3000+ with 1gig of 333DDR RAM and a
9800Pro, I'm looking to upgrade the card to at least an X800 XT. The
question is do I do it now and buy the AGP version or wait until I'm ready
to upgrade the whole lot with a new motherboard and go for the PCI Express
version. If I wait, I'll be looking at at least an Socket 939 Athlon64 3500+
Processor.
If I do get the X800 now, that will tie me into AGP for a lot longer as the
replacement mobo will obviously have to have AGP.

I I upgrade to the Athlon64, will the DDR 333 slow the system down?

What's the solution - views appreciated.

Jez
 
A said:
I currently have a Socket A Barton 3000+ with 1gig of 333DDR RAM and a
9800Pro, I'm looking to upgrade the card to at least an X800 XT. The
question is do I do it now and buy the AGP version or wait until I'm ready
to upgrade the whole lot with a new motherboard and go for the PCI Express
version. If I wait, I'll be looking at at least an Socket 939 Athlon64
3500+ Processor.
If I do get the X800 now, that will tie me into AGP for a lot longer as
the replacement mobo will obviously have to have AGP.

I I upgrade to the Athlon64, will the DDR 333 slow the system down?

What's the solution - views appreciated.

Jez
Click to expand...
Well for me personally I'm waiting awhile to see just how much better PCI
Express is. I'm looking at upgrading everything but my 9800Pro, so I'm
looking at AGP MB's. I just bought the 9800Pro a few months ago and I know
it's being crippled by my 2.2GHz P4 and 2100 RAM. From all that I've read so
far, at lest for now the performance gain from PCI Express is minimal. It's
a tough time to be upgrading and that's a fact. JLC
 
JLC said:
Well for me personally I'm waiting awhile to see just how much better PCI
Express is. I'm looking at upgrading everything but my 9800Pro, so I'm
looking at AGP MB's. I just bought the 9800Pro a few months ago and I know
it's being crippled by my 2.2GHz P4 and 2100 RAM. From all that I've read
so far, at lest for now the performance gain from PCI Express is minimal.
It's a tough time to be upgrading and that's a fact. JLC
Click to expand...

There is no performance difference at present with AGP or PCI-Express. Video
cards now can barely saturate a 4X AGP bus let alone 8X. PCI-Express is good
only because it increases the overall PCI bus speed so other PCI type cards
won't be crippled by current PCI's lower bandwidth. Overall PCI-Express is
good for PC's, but not necessarily an improvement in speed for video cards.
I think it will be a couple years before any card that will come close to 8x
AGP limits, let alone PCI-E. The bigger question is: will video card
manufacturers (namely ATI and nVidia of course) support their high end cards
with AGP for another year or two? I don't want to have to upgrade my mobo,
memory, and processor just upgrade my video card.
 
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