AGP/ PCI Express

[Trevor Schell]

A new video card slot is available. The PCI Express.
Will this be replacing AGP or is it an alternative.
Is it better than AGP?
Sorry , been away from the computer upgrade scene
for a while, so just trying to catch up on the new technologies..

[ajpoe]

I've been told that the PCI Express is far faster than AGP and will be the next standard.

"PCI-Express is the industry's attempt to unify all of the current different types of I/O bus into a single "future proof" standard. Over the past ten years, PCI has coped well with the large and varying uses it has been given, most of which were never foreseen when the specification was made. Ports like the AGP, ATA and USB, were developed to cope with data transmissions that needed greater support for time dependant data. Things like video streaming and other real-time applications were not explicitly address in previous PCI specifications (PCI 2.2 and PCI-X included).Current PCI specifications are based on a multi-drop, parallel bus implementation that is coming very close to its performance limits. Those limits that cannot be stretched without spending a large amount of money for very little gain."

ajpoe

[Daryl Furkalo]

PCI-Xpress will replace the whole entire PCI bus as it exists now. It is a serial interface, much like SATA is different and faster than PATA. The current PCI-X video cards out there aren't the top dogs yet and not really improved over their AGP cousins. ATI x800 isn't offered in PCI-X yet, but will later at some point in the future. The AGP bandwidth is fine for all current video games, but the advantage for PCI-X in the future will be in the data capturing.

[Trevor Schell]

The PCI Express slot looks to be the route for Video cards.
I was looking at the new DeLL configurations and the XPS line
offers the PCI express feature with 3 choices of PCI express video
cards.
AGP cards may be able to be purchased at lower prices
with this change in technology.