AGP 8X or PCI-E 4X?

[Shibby222]

I have the ASRock 775Dual-VSTA Motherboard which supports both AGP 8X and PCI-E 4X (I think, i know its not 16X but it appears to be a full size slot anyway) and i was wondering if it would be better to get an AGP 8X card or a PCI-E 16X card? Im not really sure what to get because for some reason im thinking AGP 8X would be faster than a PCI-E 16X card running at 4X. would i even be able to reach the cards potential? Wouldnt the AGP 8X version of the same card peform better than the PCI-E version running at 4X?

Thanks for the help

 

[wanderer27]

I'm not sure what the Bandwidth capacities are for each format, but I do know that up until at least last year, the full Bandwidth of AGP hadn't been fully utilized. I don't know if that is still true today or not with some of the newer cards coming out.

If you just want an opinion, I'd go with a PCIex card. This way you have any easier upgrade path if you want to change Motherboards, CPU, etc.

 

[tk11]

The ability to reuse a pci-e card in another system in the future will probably far outweigh any performance difference. Depends on what "the card" is.

 

[Shibby222]

well im probably going to spend somewhere between 200-350 bucks on the card, so probably a Radeon X1950Pro or a similar GeForce card (7900GT i think? dont remember offhand)

the rest of my system consists of 1GB of DDR2 RAM and an overclocked Core 2 Duo so i dont really know if ill be upgrading the mobo anytime soon.

 

[Shibby222]

alright i decided i want one of these two, cant really decide which one though

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130066

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130065

 

[tk11]

Those cards will be limited somewhat by a 4x connection. I still wouldn't buy an agp card though. Just upgrade the motherboard to something that can deliver more video bandwidth.

 

[dbravo223]

PCI Express is the only way to go on this one. You will get better performance with pci-e than agp.

 

[Shibby222]

alright cool, thanks for teh help everyone

i was just confused beacuse i thought that maybe AGP 8X was faster than PCI-E 4X but not 16X