AGP, PCI-E, PCI? Differences?

[BarbaricSoul]

A friend of mine, his son has this HP system (core 2 duo), with 2 gig of ram and an PCI-E card.
The last system I had that I sold to another friend (P4 @ 3.0ghz) , he bought an HD2600Pro (agp)
and it gets more FPS in CS:S than the C2D system.. The C2D system if I remember it right has an PCI-E 4350 card. I installed the cards on both the systems. I thought the C2D was suppose to be faster, I installed the cards on both the systems. Now I feel that I did something wrong somewhere..

A 2 gig C2D playing a single threaded game(meaning it only uses one core of your CPU) I would imagine wouldn't perform as a 3 gig P4. Also, that 2600pro is still a decent performer I believe(just going by what I've read on these forum and I maybe wrong) and I could believe being close to the 4350 performance wise. OC the C2D to around 2.5 and it'll beat the P4.

I'd also like to add this little tid bit of info given to me yesterday in a discussion I was having in another thread-

Man I was just kidding and just pointing out the fact that CSS is not precisely the measure that should be used to judge the performance of a modern card. There's no way you can guess Crysis performance out of CSS performance, because not only the performance on cards in CSS is not linear, but neither is coherent with the power of the cards when cards are overkill for the game. For example my 8800 GT does 200++ fps too, but I have seen other 8800GTs doing worse, but wait, that's not what I was talking about, in one of those same PCs, I've seen a 9600GT doing better fps's than the 8800GT did, both stock. That shouldn't happen, but it happens.

 

[Mussels]

because a 4350 is slower than a 2600pro agp, and cs:s wasn't limited by the p4 he had

modern low end doesnt mean its faster than old mid range.

its like comparing an 8200 vs a 7900GT, it just aint gunna match it any way, ever.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

PCI-E 16x v3 - 16GB/s
PCI-E 16x v2 - 8GB/s
PCI-E 16x - 4GB/s
AGP 8x - 2.1GB/s
AGP 4x - 1.06GB/s
PCI - 133 MB/s

PCI-X - 4266 MB/s (533 MHz, 64-bit)

A 2 gig C2D playing a single threaded game(meaning it only uses one core of your CPU) I would imagine wouldn't perform as a 3 gig P4. Also, that 2600pro is still a decent performer I believe(just going by what I've read on these forum and I maybe wrong) and I could believe being close to the 4350 performance wise. OC the C2D to around 2.5 and it'll beat the P4.

Because of architectural differences between Core 2 (Conroe/Penryn) and Pentium 4/D (NetBurst), the Core 2 is likely to still beat the Pentium 4 at 2/3 the clockspeed. Conroe/Penryn architecture is better suited for games than NetBurst/Nehalem.

 

[PotatoChip]

agp sucks

 

[PVTCaboose1337]

2.1gb/s vs. 4 gb/s is really not that much for lower end graphics cards, so I would think AGP is fine for that, and lets face it, if you are buying an AGP card for your old system, you are not gonna buy top of the line GFX either, so AGP will be sufficient, but lets say you used AGP for a GTX295 or something, well then there would be MAJOR performance decreases (take a look at the test with the GTX295 in a PCI-E-1x slot, it was bad, like 20% perf drop, how would that be in AGP!!!)

 

[BarbaricSoul]

Because of architectural differences between Core 2 (Conroe/Penryn) and Pentium 4/D (NetBurst), the Core 2 is likely to still beat the Pentium 4 at 2/3 the clockspeed. Conroe/Penryn architecture is better suited for games than NetBurst/Nehalem.

I would agree with you if he was talking about some of the newer C2D, but he's referring to a 2 gig c2d, which is the e4400. With it's 800 mhz FSB and only 2 mb of L2 cache, you really think it's faster than a p4 @ 3gigs? Also, the e4400 is not a conroe or penryn, it's a allendale.

 

[oli_ramsay]

I think I may be wrong here but check the memory bandwidth of this card and I think that is greater than what AGP can transfer. I'm probably wrong but I will at least learn something from this.

Memory bandwidth in graphics cards is the speed the Vram communicates with the GPU. Not how fast the card communicates with the rest of the system.

 

[DrPepper]

Memory bandwidth in graphics cards is the speed the Vram communicates with the GPU. Not how fast the card communicates with the rest of the system.

Is that memory bandwidth I thought that was the cards total bandwidth cheers for that.

 

[mrhuggles]

you guys should be more honest agp is better than pci because its much lower latency, and pci express is much better than agp because its much lower latency

in reality bandwidth wise... well load times will be harsher with slower interfaces, and im not talking about agp vs pci express since agp has alot of bandwidth anyways, but on a pci card you should be able to feel the load times in alot of stuff pretty bad, but agp4x and above should be fine... really as long as your agp4x your good no matter what tho the real issue isnt that, its that a box that can only do agp4x is probably going to have bottlenecks all over the place, i know this i had a barton 2600+ with 1gb ddr400 and an x1950pro which is way too much beast for that box, i would be playing doom3 and be getting like 80-120fps and as soon as something started moving it would have to wait for the cpu to handle physics or for the system memory to load stuff

the sad thing is, were talking about maybe 100 dollars worth of box to overcome these issues, my box is VERY capable gaming wise, 3.2ghz e2140, asus p5k[normal] these are 40-50 bux used, and ddr2, well ddr2 is the cheapest per mb ive ever seen any memory EVER.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227178
ive got 2 kits of that, 4gb i spent alot of money on my video card but now its only worth oh, i don't know... what do you guys think,... 75 bux?

if that sounds like a lot of money you should see how much ddr1 costs, for the same price as my whole box you could upgrade to like 2gb of ram [provided your motherboard will even run that much]

 

[oli_ramsay]

AGP is way out-dated. Sure it's faster than PCI but that's like comparing a Lada to a Skoda, neither are very fast (PCI-E would be a Ferrari ).

The 3850 is the limit of an AGP slot which was an OK card 2 years ago, but it gets eaten, shitted out and then eaten again by today's standards. I don't understand why anyone would buy an AGP card nowadays, they even cost more than their PCI-E variants.

So basically the answer to your question "How good is AGP", not very good...

 

[Yukikaze]

I would agree with you if he was talking about some of the newer C2D, but he's referring to a 2 gig c2d, which is the e4400. With it's 800 mhz FSB and only 2 mb of L2 cache, you really think it's faster than a p4 @ 3gigs? Also, the e4400 is not a conroe or penryn, it's a allendale.

I don't know about games here (But if someone wants, I can run a comparative benchmark on a P4 + HD3850 AGP as opposed to a 9600GT PCI-E and a Celeron 440), but I did run a SPi comparison between a Netburst and a Conroe-L system:

The first system was:
Intel P4 HT 3Ghz @ 4.2Ghz, 1Mb L2 Cache
2x1Gb OCZ Platinum DDR1 400Mhz CL2-2-2-5
Asus P4P800-E Deluxe Motherboard

The second:
Intel Celeron 440 2.0Ghz, 512Kb L2 Cache
1xOCZ Value DDR2 800Mhz CL5-5-5-15
Biostar G31-M7 TE Motherboard

Both systems clocked in at around 32secs for SPi 1M. When I OC'ed the Celeron 440 to 3.33Ghz (With memory at ~1100Mhz at CL6-6-6-15) it did 22secs or so for SPi 1M. Granted, pure number crunching isn't directly measuring game performance, but in this pure number crunching the Celeron 440 2.0Ghz tied with the 4.2Ghz P4 and beat it soundly while still running some 900Mhz slower after the OC. So yes, that E4400 is a good deal faster than a 3Ghz P4, even at 2Ghz, at least in SPi. Not to mention the fact that the Celeron 440 was cooled at 3.33Ghz with an Arctic Cooling Alpine7 Pro, which is a simple cooler, and the 4.2Ghz P4 requires a Ninja II with a pair of 120mm fans.

 

[frankie827]

i think the most important thing that every wants to know right now is what the specs of u2k's new pc are!

 

[Yukikaze]

i think the most important thing that every wants to know right now is what the specs of u2k's new pc are!

My guess ? A socket 423 P4 at 1.4Ghz...

 

[MilkyWay]

ill sum up the thread - if a card has a high bandwidth it maybe get slowed by an agp slot but none of the available agp cards are high enuf to max it out

the 3850 is a big card but i tihkn it was okay in an agp slot

they stopped making agp cards because the only rigs that have agp also have older cpus that the cpu could become a barrier you know other factors too like ddr1 and ht link fsb

stick a 9800gtx2 on a agp slot you might get maxxed out and the data wont be able to travel as fast causing a traffic jam

its like parallel vs serial, parallel looks good at first because 8 stream of data go through at once but on serial the data is single but much faster so end up being better

 

[mrhuggles]

meh, agp would be fast enough, if there were faster cards for it, thats why you can take 4 geforce 295s and sli them in pci express slots at 4x and its no issue at all, you probably wouldn't loose much performance if the slots were set to 1x either [load times would increase, I'd bet anything that the actual performance outside load times would change more than a small amount]

flame me all you want but AGP by its self is not a bottleneck. its the pink elephant in the room lol, CPU, RAM... mostly cpu really. pci is a bottleneck but pci latency is WAY higher, i mean come on tho its 33mhz :? ofcource its gonna be an issue thats whats so beautiful about pci express, each link is REALLY low bitrate so its latency is really low too

its bit rate is REALLY low too, like prolly the lowest of anything, but that was the idea of the design

don't believe me about agp not being the bottleneck? there are core2duo capable boards that also have agp

hey my spell check feature is failing how do you spell ofcource?

 

[3870x2]

dont get me wrong, its not like i think AGP is useless, or incredibly slow. AGP has hit its limits with the 3850, and i just get annoyed at people who spout things with no proof of backup, when they contradict common thinking. If you want to change peoples minds, you need more than a theory.

all video cards in DX9.0c (and under) require the video cards ram to be synced with the system ram (it duplicates), therefore a slot needs to be as fast as the ram on the video card, to 'max out' its performance (odds are the GPU or something would hinder it before here, but you get the point), slap a GDDR5 card into an AGP slot and watch it choke, just like modern cards (HD2400, Nv 8400) do in PCI

I read nowhere in the forum rules that one must back up what he says with any solid proof. If you don't believe him, then don't. If someone is truly naive enough to believe this, then so be it. Kind of getting tired of people saying "don't talk if you cant back it up". I'll talk, and say what I like, so long as it is in the forum rules. Saying this pretty much just incites fights by angering people, which is against the forum rules.
And no, I don't have any evidence to back this up.

 

[KainXS]

meh, agp would be fast enough, if there were faster cards for it, thats why you can take 4 geforce 295s and sli them in pci express slots at 4x and its no issue at all, you probably wouldn't loose much performance if the slots were set to 1x either [load times would increase, I'd bet anything that the actual performance outside load times would change more than a small amount]

flame me all you want but AGP by its self is not a bottleneck. its the pink elephant in the room lol, CPU, RAM... mostly cpu really. pci is a bottleneck but pci latency is WAY higher, i mean come on tho its 33mhz :? ofcource its gonna be an issue thats whats so beautiful about pci express, each link is REALLY low bitrate so its latency is really low too

its bit rate is REALLY low too, like prolly the lowest of anything, but that was the idea of the design

don't believe me about agp not being the bottleneck? there are core2duo capable boards that also have agp

hey my spell check feature is failing how do you spell ofcource?

If I ran a GTX on AGP I would kick myself in the nuts

and the boards your talking about are the Hybrid Boards, and they are just terrible, they overclock like crap and are not compatible with alot of modern cards, I remember when I had my old 4coredual it made me so mad I went out and bought a new board and snapped that one in half to get it off this earth.

 

[mrhuggles]

hehe, don't get me wrong either, agp is dead, but... not because of AGP all by its self, more like because the very best your gonna get out of AGP is one of those junky boards with what was it an ALI chipset? i forget who made it but the ones that are 775 with ddr2 but also ddr1, and agp+pci express, asrock made one, i had it but i hated it so much, upgrading to the p5k without changing anything else upped my performance by like 30% lol seriously.

 

[mrhuggles]

AGP-8x 2.1GB/sec
PCI express = 250mb/sec per lane

EDIT: agp 64bit is 4gb/sec ish but i dont think thats very relevant just interesting...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bandwidths

 

[niko084]

Ok, I think what he is saying is the same thing I said....

If you are not bottle necking because of the bandwidth requirement of the AGP slot and all other system aspects are equal that AGP is faster than PCI-E, and he is correct if that is what he is trying to say.

But it's coming out more like AGP is better than PCI-E PERIOD with all current hardware... And that is simply not true, even if you do not include SLI/Crossfire.

 

[mrhuggles]

no! i didn't say that in fact i said the opposite didn't you see me going on about how low latency it is, the way its designed is with super tiny packets little tiny itsy bitsy ones, smaller than any device, which means extremely low latency so things get back and forth way faster... it uses a lot of lanes, instead of having 32bit wide it can have 32 lanes which is like the same thing but way better like the difference between hyperthreaded dual core 2ghz and true quad core 3.2ghz


EDIT: i have a theory on why it is they wanted to lower the latency like that... well first off duh, because videocards are doing more and more and they will benefit the normal way you would think but, i think also they might be getting ready to move to a shared memory interface, something not unlike how the xbox360 works

 

[KainXS]

but we can all agree that PCI-E is superior to AGP right, because it is

AGP is now the PCI of AGP's days

AGP is dead and every now and then a zombie pops up from its grave, the last zombie was the HD3850 but that zombie was pimped out.

 

[mrhuggles]

yeah we can all agree on that, besides, if for no other reason than, cost effectiveness, back about 2 years ago you could save a little money having an AGP box but now, now if you wanted to build an AGP box from new'ish' stuff you would spend twice as much on an agp box than you would on a pci express box so there is no use for spending more than 25 dollars on upgrading an agp box [trust me there are ppl here that will sell you pieces for like nothing if you are AGP, i personally have a 5700LE with 5700 clocks and no HSF that i will trade for almost anything.] [actually it does have a HSF but the fan is glued on with hot glue cuz the default fan died and they are those little tiny ones that you cant possibly replace, sigh i REALLY hate stoopid fans that dont have ball bearings.]

 

[Yukikaze]

AGP is dead and every now and then a zombie pops up from its grave, the last zombie was the HD3850 but that zombie was pimped out.

Sigged!

 

[niko084]

Will PCI-E use all those lanes independently though to help with efficiency, like you said a HT or dual core chip..