Is AGP future proof?

steviec

I'm looking into getting a new PC. I want to do it as cheaply as possible and am focussed on processing power -> I already have optical drives, a large hard drive(but I want a fast one for booting) and my graphics card.

However, if I'm not getting a new graphics card I'll be going with an AGP motherboard and not PCI-e. Is that a bad idea in terms of possible future upgrades? My card is only a 9600XT but it still comfortably runs games on reasonable detail so I feel it'd be a waste of money to get a new graphics card. I could play Half Life 2 just fine - the loading times were much more of a problem than the frame rates.

My system in general(XP2000+) is starting to struggle with strategy games like Empire Earth 2 and stuff like that which is why I'm looking into upgrading. Would I be able to get myself a good fast set up for around 500? Considering I wouldn't need to buy the parts mentioned above.

CyberGhost

Is AGP future proof?

for 3-4 more years

Praetorian

You could sell your agp card on, and buy a similar spec pci express card to ensure you are future proofed. I think the card manufacturers will only make top agp cards for between 1-2 years more.

uberpixie

steviec wrote:

I'm looking into getting a new PC. I want to do it as cheaply as possible and am focussed on processing power -> I already have optical drives, a large hard drive(but I want a fast one for booting) and my graphics card.

My system in general(XP2000+) is starting to struggle with strategy games like Empire Earth 2 and stuff like that which is why I'm looking into upgrading. Would I be able to get myself a good fast set up for around 500? Considering I wouldn't need to buy the parts mentioned above.

1 gig twinmoss cas 2.5 pc 3200 in 2 sticks €105
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=118498&s=sc

Abit AV8 3rd eye mobo with AGP €120
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=301893&s=sc

Western dig raptor 74 gig €176
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=122429&s=sc

amd 64 3000+ boxed €152
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=307201&s=sc

Total 553 + shipping form komplett.

That should do the trick. The raptor is big enough to have an install of windows on it and a nice big partition for games.

The amd64 3000+ is plenty poke for strategy games and as it's a 939 mobo you should be able to get a dual core chip in the future..

AV8 is a nice mobo a friend of mine has one and is happy enough with it.

Capt'n Midnight

Moore's law still applies. You can only future proof for a short time.

Depends on what you want the PC for. Many games are limited by the Card rather than the CPU, for rendering the Card should have no effect. A new motherboard and entry level CPU may cost less than a high end card. Other alternatives to upgradeability include sellling the PC in a couple of years and getting a new one.

In 18 months you will almost certainly be able to get the same spec card for half the price or one twice the sec for the same price.

uberpixie

Praetorian wrote:

You could sell your agp card on, and buy a similar spec pci express card to ensure you are future proofed. I think the card manufacturers will only make top agp cards for between 1-2 years more.

Which is true. But as you will be changing mobo in a year or two does it really matter?

I built a shuttle there a while back with an nforce 3 motherboard. Does it bother me much that i have agp and no pci express?

No. I am just going to upgrade next gen and sit on that card for 1.5 - 2 years.

I had a 9800 and really could not justify replacing it so soon after I bought it. It still does the business for me.

AGP is not really a problem, yet :-)

If steviec can't really afford a new gfx card it is the way to go for him.

If he goes pci express he has to spend an extra €100 on a gfx card similar in performance to what he has in agp.

kasintahan

AGP is already almost dead as far as the latest generation of cards is concerned.
I'd give it a year before they stop making the latest chips available on it.
There are a couple of new cards that do both AGP and PCI-e, but unless this becomes standard (unlikely) then AGP is a bad move on a new games PC.

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News/Details.aspx?NewsId=13974

uberpixie

kasintahan wrote:

AGP is already almost dead as far as the latest generation of cards is concerned.
I'd give it a year before they stop making the latest chips available on it.
There are a couple of new cards that do both AGP and PCI-e, but unless this becomes standard (unlikely) then AGP is a bad move on a new games PC.

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News/Details.aspx?NewsId=13974

All the next gen will be agp versions as most of the market is still in agp land.

The gen after that is a different story.

steviec

uberpixie wrote:

1 gig twinmoss cas 2.5 pc 3200 in 2 sticks €105
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=118498&s=sc

Abit AV8 3rd eye mobo with AGP €120
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=301893&s=sc

Western dig raptor 74 gig €176
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=122429&s=sc

amd 64 3000+ boxed €152
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=307201&s=sc

Total 553 + shipping form komplett.

That should do the trick. The raptor is big enough to have an install of windows on it and a nice big partition for games.

The amd64 3000+ is plenty poke for strategy games and as it's a 939 mobo you should be able to get a dual core chip in the future..

AV8 is a nice mobo a friend of mine has one and is happy enough with it.

Thanks I'm thinking something along those lines. Need a case aswell though because I'm keeping my current PC for networking.

With regard to graphics, I'm mainly into strategy games and I've been finding CPU is far far more limiting than GFX at the moment. Civ 3 becomes unplayable with a lot of computer players on my machine for example. Empire Earth 2 is fairly unplayable too. The Sims 2 chugs along at times. Thats why I want more processing power. My graphics card is capable of rendering some gorgeous graphics(flatout is silky smooth and never ever gets slowdown either) so I dont feel the need to upgrade that for a while, even as games specs go up I'll happily run them on lower settings as long as they're playable...

Giblet

AGP will be fine, you'll have to upgrade your motherboard before it becomes obsolete, even if you got PCI-E now.

RicardoSmith

I got a AGP machine cheap recently. These days I find its more cost effective just to sell the entire machine and buy a new one cheap. You can buy a decent machine for 500-600. So I've stopped worrying to much about upgrade potential. Just don't pay to much for it in the first place.

awhir

whats this for Western dig raptor 74 gig

CyberGhost

claregalway Qs wrote:

whats this for Western dig raptor 74 gig

lol, it's a hard drive, Clare

awhir

ya du but y so small

CyberGhost

Raptor is a "gaming" hard drive, if you are building a gaming rig, 74gigs is enough imho, it has 10,000 RPM!!!

of course if you are satisfied with 7200, choose something else with more space

I play HL2 on a pci card.

I'm special.

awhir

74gigs is not enough for games like all the new games a about 4gigs

thats only 18 games

Morgoth

If you went with the spec above then you could drop the raptor (some 7200rpm drives can match it for certain file transfers, it's really noisy, really expensive, and gets quite hot so that it's not suited for mini cases).

Then get a nice 200gb Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus 10 (for about 100 euro afaik! [edit again: €103, what value! - http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=302257&cks=PRL]) and have some left over for a nice case too.

edit: Who plays 18 modern games all at once?? If all you do is race through single player campaigns then you can just uninstall it when finished.

Mutant_Fruit

To be honest, its a budget PC, a non-raptor harddrive would probably be better. He could pick up an 80gig IDE for less than half the price of the raptor, and i doubt he'd notice much of a difference in performance.

DemonOfTheFall

Id say that you'll still be able to find an x800xt or a 6800ultra in a few years when you want an upgrade. People will still be selling them second hand.

If you get one of those down the line youll double to triple your performance when you want it.

rsynnott

The boards that do both aren't the best; the AGP is usually hanging off a conventional PCI interface.

astrofool

Well, back on topic, no AGP isn't future proof, at all, although it will persist for at least a year, if not longer. Thems the breaks

sutty

CyberGhost wrote:

Raptor is a "gaming" hard drive, if you are building a gaming rig, 74gigs is enough imho, it has 10,000 RPM!!!

of course if you are satisfied with 7200, choose something else with more space

Raptor's aren't "gaming hard drives" they are entry level server drives for people who dont have the money to go and buy a SCSI card and drive. However due to there price and speed. A lot of proformance users use them. Unless your heavy into file use like running a FTP or file server then you wont really notice the seak time difference. Games my load a small bit faster. But that is about it.

As for a 74gig drive not being enough for games, I use a 36gig SCSI 160 and it is more than enough. I have 15 odd games on it at the moment. (not all games are 4gigs)

Now for the on topic bit. I cant say that AGP will be around for more than 2 more years in terms of graphics cards (unless you buy a bugit board or something entry level) If your going for a new board, I'd go for a PCI-E with a X16 slot and get something like a X600 or X300 graphics card. It will give you speed and future proofing you want. (the X600's would be slightly faster than the 9600XT but not much I would say. Due to higher bus speeds and bandwidth on the x16 slot)

steviec

I'm thinking I'm going to go with the raptor though because Hard Drive seems like a big bottleneck to me.

Typically, I turn on my PC, windows boots, everythings fine. I then start up my normal programs, Outlook Express, Winamp, Firefox, MSN and Putty typically. It takes about 5 minutes of constant hard drive access for everything to load up. Once they are loaded everything runs fine though. Anytime my PC is running slow though its always hard drive access that I can hear. Of course this could be down to not having enough RAM aswell.

Another example: Unreal Tournament 2004. Levels take fooooorever to load. They're also really jumpy for the first few moments after they've loaded while the hard drive is still accessing. After that the game runs nice and smooth though. Slow down occurs very rarely, and when it does I hear the hard drive being accessed. Thats on graphics settings all maxed too. Game looks gorgeous, I don't see the need for better graphics to be honest.

Sleipnir

defrag?

astrofool

I've got 2 diamondmax 16megs in RAID here. Performance is on par with raided raptors, and capacity is 4x that of the raptors (600gig )

unkel

steviec wrote:

Anytime my PC is running slow though its always hard drive access that I can hear. Of course this could be down to not having enough RAM aswell

That's very likely. What amount of ram do you have now? You're cheapest solution is to up the ram to 1GB. I doubt if either your XP2000+ or your 9600XT are the bottleneck for RPG

Mutant_Fruit

Anytime my PC is running slow though its always hard drive access that I can hear. Of course this could be down to not having enough RAM aswell.

It could be that your CPU is too slow aswell. If your CPU is reading a bunch of files, and its maxed out... the harddrive is only going to read them as fast as the CPU can handle them. So while the HD is constantly running, its actually the CPU thats slowing it down.

Fastest way to check is when your computer does run slowly, check what the CPU usage is like. If its substantially less than 100%, and your computer is slow, then it means it is a HD issue. But in fairness, i don't think raptors are the way to go on a budget computer, way to expensive for such a small HD.

kasintahan

I think most of you are overestimating the life span of AGP.

It's not a bad bus, but PCI-e will be mainstream in 2/3 months in consumer off the shelf PC's and once that happens then retrofitting AGP will start to become expensive

Remember the dual SDR DDR motherboards? Didn't last very long, everybody dropped SD faster than a hot snot once the OEM's did.

Typically the only people who put new graphics cards into their PC's are gamers and techies. The kind of people who have the latest motherboards in the first place.

You won't have a problem buying a new AGP card in a year, but it won't be the latest chip and it will be at a price premium.

rsynnott

Hard drive speed is not a bottleneck for anything except file servers. If you want your computer to go faster, RAM is the first suspect; the hard drive is about the last.

Loobz

rsynnott wrote:

Hard drive speed is not a bottleneck for anything except file servers. If you want your computer to go faster, RAM is the first suspect; the hard drive is about the last.

This is a bit off topic, but u got me thinking.
Which is better:
2 gigs DDR 3200
1 gig DDR 4400 or higher.

Somethin tells me 2 is better than 1 but the RAM speed seems to have a big impact also. Im a bit confused.

rsynnott

Loobz wrote:

This is a bit off topic, but u got me thinking.
Which is better:
2 gigs DDR 3200
1 gig DDR 4400 or higher.

Somethin tells me 2 is better than 1 but the RAM speed seems to have a big impact also. Im a bit confused.

Depends on purpose. Really, very few people use over 1gb (I have NEVER seen my computer use the swap for anything other than the things that Linux always uses the swap for; directory listings and such). And faster memory... meh. You're unlikely to notice a difference for most purposes.

RicardoSmith

rsynnott wrote:

Hard drive speed is not a bottleneck for anything except file servers. If you want your computer to go faster, RAM is the first suspect; the hard drive is about the last.

Depends on what you are doing. Video processing, loading levels in games etc. Fast I/O can make a bit difference to many things outside servers. You notice a big difference between a 4200 drive and a 7200 one.

Mutant_Fruit

RicardoSmith wrote:

You notice a big difference between a 4200 drive and a 7200 one.

But thats a LOT more of a difference than between 7200RPM and 10,000RPM. For a budget machine, its not worth it. For an expensive machine i might recommend it, but personally i think a better CPU, more ram, or a better graphics card is a much better way to spend €100. They'd give a much more definate performance boost all the time as compared to a faster HD giving a small boost at specific times (such as the 15 seconds i spend loading a level as compared to the 20 mins i spend playing that level).

RicardoSmith

Mutant_Fruit wrote:

But thats a LOT more of a difference than between 7200RPM and 10,000RPM. For a budget machine, its not worth it. For an expensive machine i might recommend it, but personally i think a better CPU, more ram, or a better graphics card is a much better way to spend €100. They'd give a much more definate performance boost all the time as compared to a faster HD giving a small boost at specific times (such as the 15 seconds i spend loading a level as compared to the 20 mins i spend playing that level).

All very well but the point was...

1) You said "Hard drive speed is not a bottleneck for anything except file servers".

2) He specifically said he wanted a fast boot drive.

As someone esle said it depends what you are doing with the machine. If you have a problem with boot times and loading times in games then a fast drive would be something to consider. Personally 7200 are quick enough for me.