agp vs pci

[sml]

Question, is an ati rage128 16mb sdram 2x agp video card better for everday 2D sutff or is an ati radeon 7500 64mb ddr pci AIW video card? I hate to go back to pci, but is there REALLY a difference cause I don't play any 3D games at all.

[xrayvsn]

If you're not gaming, chances are you won't notice a difference. Check the speed of the RAMDAC so it can support the refresh rates at the resolution you want to work at. If you're working off a 17 or 19" monitor, the RAGE128 will suffice, because I think it will support up to 1600 x 1200 resolution in 2D.

I don't think the RAGE 128 is better than the AIW Radeon 7500 at 2D. Its just a lot cheaper. Don't know about drivers now, though. ATi seems to be putting out drivers for their radeon products, and the legacy ATi drivers weren't as good as, say the nvidia ones of the same generation from what I remember.

[Orbie]

Well assuming your using a PC, AGP will go directly to your Northbridge chip and through the frontside bus, while PCI connectivity usually stems to the Southbridge chip where other I/O devices are located. The AGP bus was created to deal with video card activity and thus is connected directly to the Northbridge which also connects main memory. While your PCI devices will experience longer latencies to access main memory. However, you say you don't utilize 3D graphics, which is primarily the traffic the AGP bus was meant to handle.

Since AGP was developed after and is based off of PCI, your looking at the same clock frequency for each although AGP is a 32-bit bus and PCI is 32 or 64-bits. PCI technically can achieve faster rates especially PCI-X, but it also has longer memory access times which are eternities for processors.

Doesn't sound like it's a hard call for you though man, if you don't do any video intensive things you won't notice any difference, buy the cheaper one...or you could always buy an AMD Athlon 64 or Opteron with HyperTransport and you'll never have to worry about making this choice again.