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The Story behind this review

A few months ago, the PC world made one major switch in the design of mainboards, the implementation of the advanced graphics port (AGP). According to claims made mainly by Intel, this move was necessary to increase the bandwidth of possible signal transfer from the CPU to the video adapter from 32bits to a 64 bit depth. According to the logics behind the argumentation, this was absolutely necessary to ensure the elimination of the bottleneck constituted by the PCI bus. This bottleneck, in turn, was blamed for the fact that, despite the revolution of processors and even the latest technology available to the video card manufacturers, overall performance of graphics cards was falling far behind the state of current computing. Well, this is a bit overstated, since 2D performance has been perfected in the past two years to a degree where the possible resolution of the monitor has become the limiting factor. In the 3D sector, however, particularly when it comes to gaming, the newer games have become so demanding that it can become quite a painful experience if you try to play e.g. Incoming or Unreal and you have to turn off all visual effects in order to just keep the game going.

The Dilemma

In the past 8-10 months, video adapters have evolved to a degree that makes even last year's cards look completely obsolete. Sure, CPUs also have evolved but nothing like the video sector. Unfortunately, however, most video adapter manufacturers decided to make their latest technology available only in AGP format with a big "to be announced" release date for the PCI versions of their products. Of course, nobody can be blamed because good performance simply is not possible using the PCI bus transfer of CPU to video processor, or, at least so the rumor goes.

Another way, of course, is to buy a new mainboard but again, it is costly and, in case, one wants to hang on to the older processor just a little longer, leaves only the Super Socket 7 boards. New SS7 boards, of course offer a variety of advantages, such as the 100+ system bus but they also offer quite a few hassles as there are still too many unresolved compatibility issues with the AGP bus, particularly with Intel i740 chipset based video cards and the Matrox G200.

So, where are we now. According to the many message boards on the www, we are back to sqare1. And, of course, there are the stubborn ones (like me) and the many wives and kids who only deserve the old hand down routine but who also would like to play a good video game once in awhile. Believe me there is nothing worse than a 14 year old who needs dad's computer every 10 minutes because he needs to play the game that won't run on his old machine... Smile.

Enough of this now, I believe the demand of the market for a high end PCI video card should be clear to anyone who was insane enough to read up to here. Just one last sentence: How could a PCI card possibly compete against an AGP card in a top notch system and what could you expect from it in a slightly older machine? Apples and oranges? True but seeing is also believing.

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