David vs Goliath - FX5900 PCI-E vs AGP Gaming Comparison

@ 2004/10/07
Back in June 2004, Intel started to push for "future technologies" with the introduction of 915/925 chipsets, LGA775 socket, DDR2 memory and PCI Express (PCI-E) bus. Out of those, PCI-E x16 attracted quite a bit of attention, as it offers a much higher bandwidth than what AGP can offer (4.2GB/s vs 2.4GB/s). In addition, PCI-E is a bus not a port, thus we can use more than one graphic card in a system, e.g. Nvidia's Scalable Link Interface (SLI) found on the 6800x and 6600GT. For more information on PCI-E, please refer to Intel's specification paper.

However, one has to wonder if it is sensible to go all the way to embrace the new technology. Does the new technology offer a better performance/price ratio in gaming than the old solution? How does P4 with DDR2 compete against AMD64 with DDR memory? Thus, we've prepared this review, David VS Goliath. Before we begin, let us find out what a PCI-E graphics card looks like.

No comments available.