The future of the AGP slot

[HAND]

I'm interested in what you people think about the supposed eventual demise of the AGP slot.

PCI Express represents 15 per cent of add-in cards

ATI introduces fresh AGP cards

Will the next generation of graphics cards have AGP cards in the top range or will they be limited to mid range and low performance range. Do you think next generation mid(or top, if they exist) range AGP cards will out perform present top range AGP cards?
Do you think they can get yet more performance out of the AGP slot?

 

[Zakharov]

Of course it is still possible to get more performance from AGP slots. The current top end graphics cards barely use the full bandwidth of a 4x AGP slot, so the 8x slot still has some life in it yet. People are not giving up on their AGP motherboards as quickly as the industry thought, so there is still a future in AGP cards. I believe nvidia has already stated that its next top end card will have an AGP option.

There are only two real reasons why the switch to PCI-E will become necessary:

1) Graphics card power consumption. If this continues to rise as it has done in the latest cards then a switch will be needed. A PCI-E slot can provide more power than an AGP slot. There are only so many molex connectors inside a pc to supply the extra juice.

2) SLI. This setup requires two PCI-E slots and is not compatible with the AGP bus. Therefore anyone who wants a SLI system has to have PCI-E cards. Personally I don't see the point in SLI unless you have money to burn and want two top of the range cards (currently 6800U).

Having said all of this, it is inevitable that PCI-E will eventually become the standard. I would therefore recommend to people to only switch to PCI-E when buying a brand new system. There is no need to upgrade just to go from AGP to PCI-E.

 

[Chieftess]

I still have an old HP scanner (atleast 8 years old probably), that uses those long SCSI type slots. (I even forget the acronym of them.). But, I'm pretty sure all types of slots will eventually die out.