Quote:
Originally Posted by Sunb!  I cannot see how a PCI card could possibly be better than AGP handing graphics? I mean the AGP has higher data transfer rates when it is time to move the geometry stream from the CPU to the graphics card and it allows your OS to manage large amounts of textures in off screen memory as well as in system memory allowing the graphics card to access these textures directly in either location (resulting in more flexible memory management) and of course has a faster clock speed and bus pipelining.
In my opinion PCI is taking one step back but that of course depends on the usage of your PC as an end user. Have in mind it is a long time ago I were into the hardware business so I might have missed something the past couple of years though.  |
SunB!
You misunderstand.
-HAL- is not talking about PCI, he's referring to PCIe (the "e" is for express) PCIex16 is the newest standard and its data tranfer is vastly superior than that AGP 8X.
As for the Creative X-Fi, you might want to be careful. Creative has had some problems with that card. Apparently it seems to conflict with certain types of Motherboards which cause a hissing/cracking sound. This has hit about 1 in 5 people. The Audigy 4 is a safer bet UNLESS you plan on doing audio recording/editing/sampling etc...In which case I would recommend you look at the Turtle Beach soundcards anyway...
If you do buy the X-Fi at least make sure that you can return it. If you just doing games/music/etc it really doesn't make much difference if you get an older card, just make sure it supports the speaker setup you have (5.1, 7.1 etc...) I use a Audigy2 ZS, works fine.