At 03:05 AM 11/26/2002, Ian Porter wrote:
>The short answer to that one is no, a PCI card is not comparable to an AGP
>card. Someone else will do doubt add a more technical explanation - my
>understanding is that AGP, or Accelerated Graphics Port', is the new
>standard for running graphics hardware, and that no more hardware is being
>developed for PCI based cards.
>
>I was asked recently by a customer to get him a reasonable GFX card, so that
>his son could run Grand Theft Auto 3, but because his old HP Pavilion lacked
>an AGP slot, it was difficult to find a card for him - most of my suppliers
>have stopped handling PCI GFX cards.
>
>I finally found him a card but it wasn't up to much.
>
>Take your mobo back and get one with an AGP slot.  Note that the early AGP
>slots were 1x speed, then they went to 2x, then 4x and now the latest are
>8x.
>
>8x will obviously cover a lot of future use, but most of the mainstream high
>quality GFX cards are
>still 4x.

I thought I would jump in here and add a bit to Ian's comments.

AGP 8x is a new standard also known as AGP3.0 and is expected to be the
end of the AGP class video cards.   Why you might ask?  Next year we
expect to see a whole new chipset to appear on motherboards that includes
the new PCI Express standard.  This will in fact bring us back to PCI video
cards, but not those we have seen so far, but the new PCI Express cards.
The PCI Express standard jumps the PCI thorough put up to 2.5gigabytes
per second, the current big bottleneck on a motherboard.

For more on this topic, read the article on our website about it:
http://freepctech.com/articles/articles.php?ArticleId=124

    Bob Wright
The NoSpin Group
http://freepctech.com

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