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Final Thoughts

It has been one of the best guarded open secrets in the PC industry that PCIe does not add anything over AGP when it comes to gaming. Reasons are found in the entire infrastructure of the PC configuration with bottlenecks in the memory subsystem and the host bus between the CPU and the chipset and, no to forget, in the software itself. As pointed out in a number of earlier articles, texture compression and limited vertex counts in "coded" applications do not require the amount of bandwidth hyped up by the PCIe promoters. In so far, there is really nothing much that we should expect in form of a performance hit when moving back to an AGP system.

For those who have not seen it, the Catalyst Control Center showing "All Settings"

Graphics adapters are the limiting bottleneck for performance in ANY current system when it comes to gaming. Don't be fooled by benchmarks showing Intel faster than AMD or vice versa, all of this only applies to hypothetical low resolution runs with all eye candy turned off. Especially above 1024 x 768, as meager as that may sound in a day and age where most desktops are natively running at 1280 x 1024 or even higher, the graphics card itself rather than any bus interface or other system component is the one and only bottleneck in the system - as far as gaming is concerned. The mere fact that an AGP x4 system could hold its own is probably the best proof for the validity of this argument.

Notably at higher resolution, the card we had for testing literally smoked its PCIe counterpart. This, however, cannot be attributed to any secret da Vinci code hidden within the AGP specs, the local frame buffer with twice the density of that used on the PCIe card is the sole culprit for the AGP supremacy.

Contrary to the common grain of wisdom, gaming is not the only thing that personal computers are used for. In fact, unbeknownst to the gaming community, there is an entire world of media encoding out there and that is where PCIe really does make a difference - or else, where AGP, especially x4 can show some weaknesses. A case in point that we did not mention "yet" is the playback of audiovisual content. As long as we had a standard DVD format or an ordinary MPEG file, things were working just fine, whenever we tried to play back an H.264 encoded MPEG file created with MainConcept, Windows Media player would start playing some skins but not the content of the movie. To make sure that there was no file corruption involved, we opened the same file via a 100 Mb Ethernet connection on a different computer - it was working just fine. Failure to launch the H.264 file on the test system was, however, not related to the X1950 Pro AGP card, an X800 XT (AGP) failed just as miserably under the circumstances.

It is a moot point to try and pinpoint the issue at hand to one or the other component, for all we know, it could have been the 300W PSU that just couldn't handle high definition content or else, it might have been a chipset or driver issue. Most likely, on a different system configuration, things would have worked just fine but whatever it might have been, it is an isolated incident in an otherwise stellar test record.

Epilogue: We did run the entire system on a 300 W PSU and for what it's worth, the setup was - mostly - as quiet as a church mouse. It is, though, necessary to mention that this was really pushing it. Adding just a Seagate 100 MB Seadisk caused occasional tripping of the PSU fuse. The bottom line, therefore, is that for a system of this caliber, one should at least have a solid 301 W PSU ….

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