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PCIe Ramps Up : Seven PCI Express Graphics Cards Compared |
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Written by Mavke
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Monday, 18 October 2004 |
GamePC has compared seven PCI Express graphics cards. The transition to PCI Express has indeed been a painful one for the computing industry, causing confusion and frustration for both system builders and consumers. While changing computer connection standards is never easy, the pain of moving to PCI Express graphics cards from the well known AGP 8x standard has been made heightened by simultaneous releases of new graphics processors from both ATI and nVidia. Some of these new chips are for PCI Express, some are for AGP, some can be run on either connection type. If you don't follow this stuff on a daily basis, the situation can get really confusing, really fast.
 PCIe Ramps Up : Seven PCI Express Graphics Cards Compared
There are certainly a lot more choices when it comes to picking out a new
PCIe graphics card than there was three months ago. There is now a fairly wide
range of cards for high-end, mid-range, and budget gamers with PCIe support.
While the selection is nowhere near the amount of AGP-8x class cards on the
market, chances are that the majority of people could find a suitable PCIe card
for their situation without much effort.
Our benchmarks clearly show that
ATI is in the lead when it comes
to high-end PCI Express hardware with their Radeon X800 XT family. These cards
simply dominate the competition in most benchmark (sans Doom 3), and really have no
competition from nVidia at
this time. We've heard time and time again that nVidia’s GeForce 6800 PCI
Express hardware is "just around the corner", but we have yet to see actual
cards on the market. ATI, on the
other hand, has been able to get decent quantities of their X800 XT PCIe chips
out there on the market, which has forced a lot of high-end gamers to go the ATI route, who would normally
consider nVidia.
On the
other hand, nVidia's QuadroFX
PCIe card is the one of the only workstation-class cards on the market. ATI's competing high-end FireGL
PCIe cards are nearly impossible to find, whereas nVidia has several QuadroFX PCIe cards which are readily available on the market. 3DLabs won't have their PCIe
workstation cards out until late November, while Matrox hasn't even announced any PCIe cards as of yet. While ATI is the choice for high-end gamers, nVidia
looks to be the choice for high-end workstation users.
In the mid-range,
we really, really like nVidia's new GeForce 6600 GT card. This card gives incredible performance for the money, especially in new titles such as Doom 3 and
Counter-Strike: Source Final. The AOpen GeForce 6600 GT card we tested was less expensive than ATI's competing Radeon X700 Pro card, but was faster in nearly
every benchmark. The 6600 GT also was surprisingly close in performance to the QuadroFX 3400 PCIe card, which is roughly five times the price of the 6600 GT. While we didn't mention this before, the GeForce 6600 GT is also quite an overclocker, and looks to be one of the best price to performance ratio cards from the nVidia camp in quite a long time.
The adoption rate for PCI
Express graphics cards will no doubt pick up in the upcoming week when new Athlon64 PCIe enabled chipsets are announced, giving AMD users a chance to get in on all of this terrific new hardware. Once AMD64 users get onboard, I think we'll see a lot of new PCIe graphics cards being announced to fulfill demand. As an AGP 8x user for my home and work machines, I'm still not convinced that there
is any major feature of PCI Express which makes me want to ditch my current hardware and move to PCIe, but it's certainly on my want-list for my next major upgrade. With PCI Express so close to breaking out and becoming a truly
mainstream product, it's hard to recommend sinking a lot of cash in a new AGP 8x card now. As cliché as it may be, PCI Express certainly is the wave of the future.
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