PCI Express question. Help!

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Mr_Phil

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Hi guys.

My dad just bought the family a new PC. Pentium 4 2.9 GHz, 512 RAM etc etc. I'm going to be primarily using it for gaming, and so I was disappointed to see that the GFX card is a Radeon X300 SE 128mb. Half Life 2 goes like a dream in 1024 x 768, but Doom 3 is a bit of a nightmare to run.

Basically, I'm hoping to by a GFX card that's a little more future proof. Am I right in thinking that seeing as my PC's paperwork states that I only have PCI Express ports on my mobo, I won't be able to use AGP cards? If so, are there any PCI Express cards that offer equal performance to, say, a Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb? I've been looking at benchmarks, and haven't found any direct comparisons between AGP and PCI Express based cards.

Thanks for reading,

Mr_Phil
 
it all depends on your motherboard

does your motherboard support AGP or pci-express

to find out, just check if your radeon x300 is AGP or pci-e

edit: also, there's no difference between AGP and pci-e's performance
 
X700 is purely PCI-E

though you can as well find X8xx series and I believe X600 is as well offered into this.

BUT (cannot make the Font bigger). do you have shares in ATI? that you are concentrating their products? if I were you looking for a Performance PCI-E card, I would have rather went to the 6600 GT. its faster than X700 (both on PCI-E).

SO???
 
I'm pretty sure, being sensible now, that my motherboard only supports PCI-e as it says nothing about AGP in any of the documentation.

Thanks, BlindArrow, for your 6600 GT suggestion. It certainly seems like the front runner for me at this point, as I certainly won't have the cash for something like an iteration of the X800/X850.

The only thing that concerns me is this. Will there be any visual difference between an ATI and an nVidia card? I'm very impressed with the visual effects in Half Life 2 for example, and I know that ATI and nVidia use different software for Shaders etc. Will there be a difference in how effects like water reflection/particle effects/textures are displayed?
 
The 6600GT is faster than both the x700 and the 9800XT (and pro)

On the same settings you wouldnt be able to tell the difference between the image quality on the ATI vs Nvidia card, however a 6600GT will allow you to run HL2 at a much higher quality :)
 
diabloII said:
that's a dumb test imo, they use amd for agp and intel for pci-e

I agree that they should have used the same type of processor for both types, but I'm to lazy to go find a better comparison. :)
 
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