When are they going to start actually utilizing PCI-E is the right question. Currently I believe it's the X850 that uses the most bandwidth out of PCI-E but other than that card in particular the other ones don't use the bandwidth PCI-E is supposed to deliver to it's full potential. Currently it's not worth getting PCI-E IMO, but I also tell people that going to AMD64 isn't really all that needed right now either.
Sure it's "futureproof" I guess, but not really, because by the time all of it's fully taken advantage of, it'll be time to upgrade anyway and I will have saved my money opposed to trying to get the latest and greatest right away.
PCI-E will take over AGP, that's no doubt....but how long will it take them to really make use of it? That's what you gotta find out.
would it be safe to say that with the new release the prices on the AGP ones will ultimately go down..?
Well in the case of the 6600GT the AGP is more expensive. Things like SDRAM are ridiculously expensive because it's old and rare, so the few people who need it are screwed by having the price jacked up when technically it should go down. And by rare I don't mean like rare in the literal sense that it's hard to find, but most people are to DDR now.
Prices should drop unless they do to AGP what's been happening to older RAM.......but then again it's all about supply and demand.
Once PCI-E is fully utilized AGP should drop though......hopefully