Drunken Bungle Whore

i think ive been out component business for a while. Im looking for a new pc so...

pci-express the new better version of agp. Agp are now at 8x while pci-e are at 16x?

also SATA are much faster than the ata133 drives?

Drunken Bungle Whore

then theres socket numbers.....

jfrf

looking at thre benchmarks the benefit of pci express is basically zero
just as agp4 to agp8 was only 1-3%
there arent any real pci express cards arounf at the monet

im not convinced that serial ata is much faster as well.

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

Serial ATA is faster, but don't expect miracles. SATA RAID doesn't work properly in nForce2-based motherboards.

As for PCI-E, ATM the principle bottleneck for all games is the rendering speed of the gfx - even AGPx4 isn't a bottleneck on most systems. If it isn't a bottleneck, then speeding it up won't generally make any difference. I'd avoid PCI-E for at least twelve months - by then there may be games that can use it.


M

ChrisB

The PCI Express speed ramps might not have been seen yet but it's probably a good choice in terms of platform longtivity. Yes, AGP will be around for a while yet but there's a lot of marketing dollars behind PCI-E. The official Intel design for the 915 and 925 chipsets (their newest) only support PCI-E for the video. Some clever mobo' manufacturers have hung an AGP port off the PCI bus but it's slower than native AGP.

The only PCI-E cards available in quantity are video cards. The rest of the market place is still playing catch-up for NICs, sound etc.

SATA also has side benefits, like smaller cables to improve ease of build and air flow through a case.

john_s

iTrader: (1)

I think both SATA and PATA drives are more limited by how fast the drive can read the data off the disk (much slower than the interface data rate), so there's not much in it really, except possibly when doing burst transfers from the drive's cache.

John.