PCI express?

[Yayhon]

Okay, havent looked at video cards in a good while, but I'm in the market for something more powerful. It seems though that all the new stuff is PCI express, and I have an AGP slot. Is there anything I can do without replacing the entire motherboard? Currently rocking a Radeon 9800 pro 256meg card. Any suggestions?

[Technophile]

If you want PCI Express, the only way to get it is to replace your motherboard. You could still get a decent video card, just not the ultimate pimp shit.

[Yayhon]

I guess I picked the exact wrong time to buy a gaming computer, as far as upgradability goes at least. I'll throw another gig of ram in there and see if that helps.

[Technophile]

There's never a good time. How much ram do you have now? Motherboards are not really all that expensive... What do you have for a processor?

[Yayhon]

Got 1 gig now, and a P4 2.8 processor. Also got a raid array going, so that may or may not limit my mobo choices?

[Technophile]

Is your RAID serial ATA? How many drives? Are they mirrored or striped? Most pimp motherboards come with SATA RAID controllers these days and can do striping or mirroring or striping and mirroring. What is it that's running slow for you? If you have to lower texture detail or ansioscopic filtering or altialiasing settings, then the vid card probably is the culprit. If it's other stuff, it could be something else. I'd hate to see you buy a vid card and mobo and find out your processor was the bottleneck.

[jaysaul]

None of the consumer vid cards go any faster than the same AGP card.
The PCI-Express bus is faster but the cards are not up to that speed yet.
You can still find most good cards in an AGP flavor.

[Technophile]

They may not go up to the full 16x bandwidth but they do go faster, at least according to these benchmarks:
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/gra...charts-07.html
vs.
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/gra...charts-06.html