PCI-E or AGP?

**TomX** · 10-19-2005

Hey,

I'm going university next year (and this is the millionth thread I've started with this line) and am planning on building a computer which I'll be buying the components for next monday.

Now, I do not play video games so I assume I will not need the latest graphics cards. The computer will be used for browsing, music, programming and watching TV series.

I have £480 to spend and I already have a HDD and AGP GFX card (Radeon 9250, not brilliant).

PCI-E
------
- Good for upgrading in the future, allows me to use the latest graphics card
- Movies will look nice

AGP
-----
- Cheap
- Bad upgradability

Although AGP has bad upgradability, I don't know whether or not I'll actually ever need to upgrade to PCI-E.

So the question is, given I don't play on games, is PCI-E worth much more than AGP?

Thanks in Advance
TomX

PS. I'll be running a 64bit processor and distribution incase this helps.

**Infinity** · 10-19-2005

The difference between PCIe and AGP is very small at the moment ...

The majority of the mobo´s released have PCIe (I encountered one which had both)
I´m not going to college this year (I´ll go in 1,5) but my custom pc (which is going to be delivered at my house this week) looks like this.

Antec SLK3800 (very silent and has enough power to have SLI enabled)
Epox EP-9NPA+ Ultra (one of the best mobo´s out there... look at www.anandtech.com for detailed information)
Asus Nvidia Geforce EN6200TC/TD 256 MB ... (not the best out there but it beats the crap out of the ATI equivalent)
Zalman CNPS-7000B-Cu (I want my pc to be silent at all times) + Arctic Silver Premium coolingpaste..
AMD Athlon 64 Venice 3200+ (beats the crap out of almost every intel proc.)
Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 (250 GB, praised as best buy atm ... www.anandtech.com)

See... not built for gaming but it has enough upgrade capabilities..

I´d say go with PCIe anyway cause it´s going to be the new standard...

**nelamvr6** · 10-19-2005

I would go PCI-E, AGP is a dead end. You say that you don't need a great graphics subsystem, and that's true for now. But things change, you may decide differently later.

You can get a good budget PCI-E graphics board now for just as cheap as an AGP board. Also, the latest mobo's will be offering PCI-E.

**jaboua** · 10-20-2005

If I could choose, I would choose PCIe.

**techieMoe** · 10-20-2005

PCIe is where things are going, but unless you're not planning on upgrading for the next 5 years, I would personally still go with AGP. At the moment, PCIe is still too young to be standardized, in my opinion. Every motherboard manufacturer has a different idea of what ports to offer, in what quantities, and whether or not to use new technologies like SLI. I'm waiting to see how it settles down.

**benjamin20** · 10-20-2005

i would say pci-e simply because you can get super cheap modern graphics cards that come with a small amount of memory and then if it ever nneeds more it will tap into your system memory. this allowes a signifigant price drop. the disadvantage however is that if you try to play a big ass game you will be using a lot of system memory (although) nowadays its not exaxtly a big deal. most things you will do wont go outside the onboard memory. its just the super graphics intensive avtivities that will be a problem. but the logic is that why would you buy a low end graphics card if you are wanting to do graphics intensive stuff anyway.

if you were interested in the amd 754 chipset however, your only real options are agp, which isnt bad, its just older and therefore totaly uncool. and you do want to be cool, dont you?

**TomX** · 10-20-2005

Originally Posted by benjamin20

and you do want to be cool, dont you?

Well, that's why I'm running Linux

**winter** · 10-20-2005

AGP cards now a relitively cheep so ye can save some money for all thouse important things in uni..like books, tution fees.

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