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A few weeks ago, we were looking at the Sapphire X1950 Pro graphics adapter in its default version as PCIe card. Arguably a "best buy" candidate, the X1950 Pro has all it takes to become the ultimate object of desire for anyone owning a single PEG slot system and, therefore, deprived of even the slightest hope of ever running in SLI mode - driver hack or not. More intriguing, especially in view of the modest price point is the 1950 Pro for anybody with an obsolete AGP system, that is, if such a version of the card were indeed available.

As it happens, the prayers have been answered by Sapphire (and a few others) with the release of the RADEON X1950 Pro "AGP", using the established technology of ATI 's, er, Rialto's PCIe-to-AGP bridge chip we have seen already on the X1600 Pro. In terms of bandwidth requirements, there is little question that the AGP x8 interface with its 2 GB/s bandwidth suffices for most games currently out there. If anywhere, quantitative differences should show in some CAD applications and even those, as we found out only a few weeks ago are hardly noticing the difference between a PCIe 4x and a PCIe 16x interface , where the raw bandwidth of the PCIe 4x interface equals that of the AGP x8 interface. To be honest, for most gaming applications even AGP x8 doesn't really matter much over AGP x4 as long as sideband addressing is enabled, which results in a dedicated data path without interruption by address and command signals on the same bus.

Needless to say that this reopens the entire can of worms about upgrading where and what and the general definition of obsolescence in the world of PCs. Just the accommodation of PCIe technology constitutes a severe obstacle for almost any owner of systems 2 years in use or older, since there is essentially nothing that can be re-used. It starts with a new motherboard, which in turn has a different chipset and that chipset requires new drivers and - by the way - parallel ATA is no longer really supported, so dump the Hard Disc and call the friendly operators at Microsoft for another registration key. By the time one gets to that point, the other hurdles as in new CPU, new heatsink, new power supply, and new system memory have already been mastered.

Bottomline is that the upgrade to a PCIe card often enough involves much more than just the card itself and its usually moderate to steep acquisition price, the ancillary leaks of the wallet easily combine to one major hole. Not to mention the hassle of the software reconfiguration including getting rid of all that crap that has accumulated since the last system reconfiguation. And all we wanted was just that little upgrade to play that one new game we got for Christmas ….

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