PCIe Round-Up

Round-Up @ GamePC

• AOpen Aeolus GeForce 6600 256MB PCI Express x16
• AOpen Aeolus GeForce 6600 GT PCI Express x16 128MB
• PNY QuadroFX 3400 PCI Express x16 256MB
• Asus Extreme EAX600XT/TD Radeon X600 XT PCI Express x16 128MB
• ATI Radeon X700 Pro PCI Express x16 256MB
• Sapphire Radeon X800 XT PCI Express x16 256MB
• Asus AX800XT/2DT Radeon X800 XT PCI Express x16 256MB

Zitat

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Our benchmarks clearly show that ATI is in the lead when it comes to high-end PCI Express hardware with their Radeon X800 XT family. These cards simply dominate the competition in most benchmark (sans Doom3), and really have no competition from nVidia at this time. We’ve heard time and time again that nVidia’s GeForce 6800 PCI Express hardware is “just around the corner”, but we have yet to see actual cards on the market. ATI, on the other hand, has been able to get decent quantities of their X800 XT PCIe chips out there on the market, which has forced a lot of high-end gamers to go the ATI route, who would normally consider nVidia.

On the other hand, nVidia’s QuadroFX PCIe card is the one of the only workstation-class cards on the market. ATI’s competing high-end FireGL PCIe cards are nearly impossible to find, whereas nVidia has several QuadroFX PCIe cards which are readily available on the market. 3DLabs won’t have their PCIe workstation cards out until late November, while Matrox hasn’t even announced any PCIe cards as of yet. While ATI is the choice for high-end gamers, nVidia looks to be the choice for high-end workstation users.

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Zum Einen ist es ein PCIe-Roundup und zum Zweiten ist der Unterschied zwischen heutigen AGP- und PCIe-Karten marginal. Die erste Generation tendiert immer nur dazu, den neuen Standard zu etablieren, wie es sich beispielsweise auch bei SATA verhält. Insofern befindet sich die Leistung fast auf gleichem Niveau und kann somit vernachlässigt werden.

Im Artikel haben sie die Vorteile von PCIe schön aufgelistet:

Zitat

• Double The Bandwidth - PCI Express X16 slots have peak bandwidth levels of 4.0 GB/s (up to 8.0 GB/s bi-directional), compared to 2.1 GB/s of AGP 8x. While the extra bandwidth is always nice to have, even today's high-end graphics cards don't make use of the 2.0 GB/s which AGP 8x offers, so the extra bandwidth PCIe x16 offers is generally regarded as a feature which "future-proofs" the graphics card standard for the next few years. While high-end gaming always makes use of wide bandwidth pipes, applications like HDTV decoding also are incredibly bandwidth intensive, so the extra bandwidth may be needed sooner than most realize.
• More Power - PCI Express can deliver higher amounts of power to the graphics card through its new motherboard connector, which means many PCI Express cards can run without dedicated power connectors. Four of the six cards we're testing today get all their power directly from the motherboard, whereas the two high-end cards still pull too much juice, and require a dedicated power connector in addition to the PCI Express connector power.
• Cleaner Designs - AGP was designed fairly quickly in the late 90's to alleviate a quickly escalating problem with graphics card bandwidth. PCI Express fixes many of AGP's longstanding issues by providing a much cleaner design with less pins, allowing for motherboard designs to be simplified. This doesn't not really affect the end user in any way, but cleaner designs are always a positive in our book.
• Multi-Card Capabilities - AGP only allows for a single, high speed graphics slot, whereas PCI Express allows for multiple graphics cards to be installed in one system. The amount of graphics card slots is only limited to the amount of PCI Express lanes in the chipset and how many of those lanes motherboard makers choose to implement. Most all first generation PCI Express motherboards only feature one graphics slot, but multi-card PCI Express systems will be hitting big time by the end of the year.
  
  Not only are multi-card scenarios great for performance when multiple cards are linked together, this is also great for anyone who runs multi-monitor configurations. You can run dual, high-speed PCI Express graphics cards and not sacrifice any performance. Many multiple monitor scenarios today rely on a single AGP and a 32-bit PCI based graphics card, which has always seemed like somewhat of a hack.

Aber die Frage ist nicht, ob PCIe oder AGP besser ist, denn die Antwort ist offensichtlich. Die Frage sollte lauten: Wann wechsle ich zu PCIe.