No socket AGP enabled socket 939 board is gonna limit PCI-E in any but the 8800 series cards, not whilst there is at least some availability for dual core athlons and opterons to go into them and in any case there will be millions of those CPU's out there used on the likes of flea bay for people to buy for some time to come, Jesus, I sold a few weeks ago an old Barton xp3000 on flea bay and got £120 for it! there were like 90 people watching it and that price that buys me in the UK a brand new athlon 4200x2.
In many circumstances there is not even a performance hit with AGP over PCI-E as often the additional bandwidth is not being used just the extra price to pay but then again for those without the dosh, its less of a price to pay than an upgrade to AM2 or C2D where they need to replace CPU, mobo and DDR for DDR2, I say if there is customer demand then there should be availability and if manufacturers were not making money out of it, they would not be making them in the first place.
Ohhhhhh and PCI-E versions of the 1300 series cards are equally as crap!
I'm not saying AGP yields poorer performance because of bandwidth, that really isn't true, but that isn't a reason to keep cranking AGP cards at increased expense and effort. There is slight bandwidth limitations on some cards in some circumstances, there is slight added latency with the bridge chip, and there is far increased latency when trying to use System RAM to augment VRAM, but that isn't the point. An upgrade to PCI-E for the VAST majority of users is quite cheap. Someone with a socket 939 or 775 chip has an upgrade for less than $70 US in many options, someone who dosen't (socket 478 and A) could get a PCI-E enabled socket 939 or AM2 board for a chip which only costs $60 US more (several semprons meet this criteria) which would be faster than any chip on either of those two platforms.
For those who don't build their own systems, the vast majority of budget computers available now are PCI-E.... so there's a sub $500 option for a COMPLETELY NEW COMPUTER.
And think of that person buying your last CPU, not only could they get a better one and a motherboard capable of using the same RAM, the same graphics card, AND a PCI-E slot for the price they paid you, but they probably don't even know it (the only reason it went for so much is that high end chips for any platform go for a lot, because of stubborn people not wanting to upgrade, AGP is getting there).
Squeezing life out of a system can be nice, but years down the road it is not cost effective or necissairy and you can do quite a bit better with only a couple components new.
Not to mention the balance of the computer for games, a good graphics card can only take an Athlon XP or P4 (478) so far, then the CPU bottlenecks any new games you try to play. Not to mention memory capacity issues with the board and in the case of 478, RDRAM in general.
Also, I know the PCI-E x1300s are crap, but they're cheap crap. Thanks to the bandwidth of PCI-E, they don't fit nearly as much memory on the board and just say it's 512MB with hypermemory. This makes the cards smaller and cheaper (plus no bridge chip) and the increased supply and variety yields better cards and bundles with them. While I entirely agree 512MB of memory is more than an x1300 should ever access.... you pay for every bit of it in an AGP version while the PCI-E version tricks you with advertising and technology (though you don't need it anyway) and gives you the card at a MUCH lower price. Since you will never use 512MB of memory with either card, there will be no performance difference. (yeah yeah, what ifs are fun, generalizations are easy. Plus, most smaller sized cards use faster memory)
I'm not saying AGP is useless, I'm saying it's a bad decision in the vast majority of cases. A lot of people know this, but there is enough who don't/are to stubborn to believe it that cards like this are continued to be released.
