Barry said:
None of the responses are really answering the original question.
As I understand it, he's building a new system from scratch, including a
new motherboard. The question was, AGP or PCIx. Given that
everything's new, no one has given a reason not to go with PCIx.
No, the question was AGP or PCI-_E_. PCI-_X_ is a 64-bit implementation of
PCI running at 66 MHz or faster and commonly found on servers. And don't
bother to tell me about nvidia's "PCX" brand name--that has nothing to do
with any standard, but some marketroid no doubt figured that it would serve
up a good dose of FUD.
It is partially a question of cost vs. performance. The PCIx system
will presumably be both higher performance
Any performance improvement would come from using a newer chipset that
supports faster memory or a faster FSB. Video performance is not
bottlenecked by the AGP 4X interface at this time--there is no benefit in
terms of video performance from using PCI Express. It can feed bits to a
gigabit Ethernet board at full speed if something in the machine can
generate them, but unless the machine is doing some kind of massive
calculation, you'd need a huge PCI Express drive array to feed that gigabit
board, and there aren't any high performance PCI Express RAID controllers
on the market as yet.
and more expandable to the
higher performance video cards in the future (for example, in 2007 (or 8
or 9), it's quite possible that the highest performance cards will all
be offered only in PCIx).
However, in 2007 or 8 or 9 is their going to be much point to putting a high
performance video board in a 3 or 4 or 5 year old motherboard?
On the other hand, in terms of what you will pay today, the PCIx system
is likely to be quite a bit more expensive.
Newegg has PCI Express motherboards in stock for $89 and PCI Express video
boards for $65. While that's higher than their cheapest AGP boards, I
wouldn't call the price difference "quite a bit more expensive".
