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David vs Goliath - FX5900 PCI-E vs AGP Gaming Comparison |
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Written by Phyro
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Friday, 08 October 2004 |
Overclockers NZ has made a comparison on the nVidia FX5900 PCI-E vs AGP. Back in June 2004, Intel started to push for "future technologies" with the introduction of 915/925 chipsets, LGA775 socket, DDR2 memory and PCI Express (PCI-E) bus. Out of those, PCI-E x16 attracted quite a bit of attention, as it offers a much higher bandwidth than what AGP can offer (4.2GB/s vs 2.4GB/s). In addition, PCI-E is a bus not a port, thus we can use more than one graphic card in a system, e.g. nVidia's Scalable Link Interface (SLI) found on the 6800X and 6600GT.
 David vs Goliath - FX5900 PCI-E vs AGP Gaming Comparison
However, one has to wonder if it is sensible to go all the way to embrace the new technology. Does the new technology offer a better performance/price ratio
in gaming than the old solution? How does P4 with DDR2 compete against AMD64 with DDR memory? Thus, we've prepared this review, David vs Goliath.
When both platforms running at default clock speeds, AMD64-754/FX5900 AGP is around 14% faster than P4/PCX5900 mainly due to higher VGA operating frequency (despite being on a more "bottlenecked" AGP). When both cards are operating at the same core and memory clocks, the difference shrinks a bit but we are still
looking at circa 8% gap.
The conclusion is clear now, with AMD64/AGP being a faster and more economical gaming platform than Intel P4/PCI-E/DDR2. However, the current situation is bound to change in the near future as both nVidia and ATI are launching new GPU/VPU, namely X700 and 6600 series, respectively. Until then, we do not see the reason to jump on the PCI-E wagon.
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