Wanna know about PCI-express?
PCI-express is a recent future addition to many new motherboards in the market.
PCI-express support can have major impact on your hardware choices in years to come.
There are two main reasons to care about PCI-Express: 1) PCI is now an old standard dating back to the early 90's and no longer fits our needs in terms of speed/performance. 2) AGP also is in a similar position as PCI now, and chipset manufacturers are killing AGP motherboard support in favor of the much faster PCI Express interface. This means you are looking at a forced transition in the graphic sector, thus you really don't have a lot of choice in the coming years. At this point (August, 2008) choices in AGP cards represent less than 5% of available cards, and the latest chipsets can not be found in the form factor.
While we've spent plenty of time and energy improving the speed of processors, memory, and other parts of the PC we've done virtually nothing with the main connection betweern many devices-PCI. As such we are stuck with a technology in our PCs and Servers that still runs at the speeds and bandwidth we were comfortable with in the 90's. PCI as we know it is holding us back - it is a bottle neck - a limitation to the maximum performance of our systems.
We all want the most from our PC. To get the most out of our PC we must remove all bottlenecks (obstacles to performance). To that end we must turn to the next best alternative: PCI Express.
Q:Is PCI Express Video Faster than AGP Video?
A:Yes and No. A 16x PCI Express connection is at least 190% Faster than AGP 8x but this is the connection between the system and the video card. You use the connection the most when your video card is low on memory or when the game you are using uses a Direct X or Open GL feature that isn't supported in hardware.
So, what this means is that in terms of real world performance there may not be a huge difference between AGP and PCI Express if you are talking about identical chipsets. Unfortunately this is very hard to prove because graphics chipsets are designed either for PCI Express or AGP. If you have a card that is available in both forms then you have a graphics chipset that was designed for PCI Express and has a special bridge chip installed to let it communicate with the AGP bus. The short of this is: if two cards of the same chipset are available in AGP and PCI-E then the PCI-E one will always be faster. On PCI-E you don't have the overhead of the bridge chip so it's faster, and you have the better bandwidth so in intense situations such as high resolution gaming you'll come out on top every time.
The main point here is: If you have a system with AGP on it, it doesn't make sense to upgrade just to get PCI-E video right now. The fastest AGP card to ever come out is likely to be the nVidia 6800GT. If you are at a point where that is too slow then by all means it makes sense to make a complete switch. If your happy with you're AGP graphics options, wait until you are ready to upgrade the processor or other components before making the PCI-E switch.
extracted from 'What is PCI Express? A Layman's guide to high speed PCI-E Technology'.Read more
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