PCI Express Transition Sucks
This is one of the most poorly handled interface transitions in history, in my opinion. Unlike the migration from parallel ATA to serial ATA, or the migration from (E)ISA to PCI, this transition featured no motherboards with a combination of both new and old technology to facilitate the shift in technologies.
Even as late as 2001, we saw motherboards with ISA and PCI slots. Today we see motherboards with both serial and parallel ATA ports.. Why was the same benefit not given to consumers with extremely expensive video cards? I find it foolish that manufacturers simply didn't drop a PCI slot and add an AGP port and the appropriate controller.
Two X16 PCI Express ports, 1 AGP port, and 4 PCI ports. I would gladly purchase a motherboard with such specifications, because I would be able to keep my existing video card without having to drop $400+ on a suitable replacement. I want a motherboard and a CPU, not a complete retrofit of my computer.
But then again, nVidia controls a large segment of the high-performance PCIEx accelerators, as well as the soon-to-be premiere chipset for the Athlon 64 platform. It only makes sense to corral consumers into lining your pockets when you control the entire ordeal.
It's almost like price-fixing, and it's retarded.
Even as late as 2001, we saw motherboards with ISA and PCI slots. Today we see motherboards with both serial and parallel ATA ports.. Why was the same benefit not given to consumers with extremely expensive video cards? I find it foolish that manufacturers simply didn't drop a PCI slot and add an AGP port and the appropriate controller.
Two X16 PCI Express ports, 1 AGP port, and 4 PCI ports. I would gladly purchase a motherboard with such specifications, because I would be able to keep my existing video card without having to drop $400+ on a suitable replacement. I want a motherboard and a CPU, not a complete retrofit of my computer.
But then again, nVidia controls a large segment of the high-performance PCIEx accelerators, as well as the soon-to-be premiere chipset for the Athlon 64 platform. It only makes sense to corral consumers into lining your pockets when you control the entire ordeal.
It's almost like price-fixing, and it's retarded.
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Maybe there are technical hurdles that you or I aren't aware of that make this very difficult, expensive, or impractical...
{/Devil's Advocate}
I'm not certain, but I think it would be fairly easy for a manufacturer to include a control chip on the board that converts AGP bus calls to PCIExpress calls. Sure, there'd be a performance hit, but I think it'd be slight.. I'd be more than willing to take a performance drop to save $400.
related article: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2244&p=2
the way i see it, is that the faster they make these transitions, the faster we get new technology. it took them long enough to get rid of ISA slots. and they still need to do something bout that floppy drive.
i wish they would just put everything new on one board already, us consumers usually have to buy almost an entire computer anyways each time we upgrade.
you know, you could just hold out a little longer and horde up more cash instead of getting something new right away.
this hobby we've taken up is just a waste of hard-earned cash.
reminds me, my family use to run a pc shop, and i open drawers sometimes around my parents house and still find amd 286's and so on, memories.... :o
oh yeah, and also, remember the simm to dimm transitions during the time of i think the hx and tx chipsets. wow, that was one slow transition!
They already have PCIe-to-AGP bridges, as they are used in both nVidia's and ATI's current-gen chipsets to port them over to PCIe. The chip itself is the same, but they both admit to using a "bridge" between the PCIe slot and the circuitry of the otherwise AGP video card.
Now, if a manufacturer were to stick such a bridge between the PCIe bus, and a "legacy" AGP 8X slot, I don’t see why that would be much different aside from broadening the consumer base and saving potential purchasers as much as $500!
it's actually the superflower sf-201t, it is tri-window though, with a blowhole on top. love this case! but i cannot wait to see the new BTX cases, i hate blowing across my HDD and into the case.
hmmmm, now you make me curious of what a kingwin kt-404 looks like....
It also may be up to the mobo manufacturer to add such a bridge to the PCIe bus for chipsets which don't nativly support AGP. In which case, sombody should call ABIT or ASUS...
yeah kingwin and superflower are the same thing....i think superflower is an oem distributer for kingwin or vice versa. anyway the kingwin kt-404 looks exactly the same, but i don't have my digital camera right now so i can't take a pic.
i am confused as to why you don't like the 2 80mmm fans on your hard drive cage....keeps my 4 harddrives nice and cool. Really my only complaint with it is that the 3 acyrlic windows hurt the overall system cooling effectiveness. Systems temps are a little higher than i would like them to be at around 35 degrees Celsius. My super cheap raidmax case that cost less than $30 has a system temp of 28 degrees Celsius.
anyway, why is it that we can figure out what the next chipsets should contain functionality wise, but the chipset folks do it their own (asinine) way. here is what i want......double pciex16 with and 8x agp in between them...please excuse the bad photochop.
i have to agree with you about the acrylic windows, looks over functionality. My next case will have less windows, though for sure.
My P4 2.6c @ 3.3 hovers around 34C also, i thought it was the case too.
oh, and i hate how the air coming into the case gets warmed up by the HDD!
there has got to be a better way to cool HDDs!
Wouldn't having a vid card in that agp slot, something as big as a x800 or 9800xt take out both PCIe slots?
An HSI bridge chip makes perfect sense, as both NVidia & ATI have used them on previous products to convert native AGP products to PCI-E and vice versa. The problem with that though, is how to integrate the bridge chip so as to provide translation services for the video card only, and not interfere with the other native PCI-E devices devices in the PEG1x slots that are utilizing the same bus.
IIRC, ECS (maybe QDI or some Taiwan integrator) is designing a motherboard that has both PEG16x & AGP8x slots. Only one slot can be used at any one time, but there's a downfall: The AGP interface is emulated over the PCI-E architecture, resulting in a performance hit in upwards of 30% versus the same AGP card used on a "true" AGP8x system.
AFAIK, the chipset that VIA is making that supports both AGP8x & PEG16x is the PT880.
Finally, its' cheaper for motherboard makers to implement PCI-Express versus PCI/AGP systems.
If you want half-asxed, this would do.
No, I am staying away from PCI-E for a while. I figure that good 'old' AGP mobos and video cards should be redily available for quite a while.
I'll only change when it becomes equal in price (or cheaper) and there is a performance advantage.
But remember, I still fold on KT7As.....
I find it funny, but incompatibility is what drives this IT market. People who had ISA modems had to buy new PCI ones when upgrading. They had to replace their RAM as well, and their graphics cards (remember VESA, add-on 3D cards?). They had to replace their mobo when upgrading chips cuz' the sockets don't match. And this was most probably precipitated by a software upgrade that was required to do a task.
Now, they have to buy USB cards or buy a new mobo (that has firewire as well) to use their digital gadgets.
I understand the performance increases that new technology brings, but if someone wants to opt out, they can't. Imagine that if you wanted to use higher ocatane fuel, you needed to buy a certain type of plug. But, they've changed the form factor of the plug which requires a new cylinder. Don't want to make that large investment? Well, you have no choice, because all the present fuel that can use your obsolete plug will be phased out in 6 months.
Its a gripe, but I think its a fair one. Imagine the pandemonium when they finally switch over to digital TV signals and those billions of TV sets are no longer good (without an upgrade of course).
yes, but you would only be able to use either the pciex16 slots or the agp slot at a given time. Much like the ddr/ddr2 thing....can't use both at the same time.
via's dual (agp and pcie) chipset is callled the pt880 pro. pt880 is agp only. see this article....http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2244&p=2
but i agree, this whole transition blows. I said the same thing when going from ISA to pci though. I mean i had to ditch my ISA 16.6kbps modem for a faster 28.8kbps pci modem, and also ditch my first mobo, cpu, etc... because i didn't have any free pci slots.
It is the exact same thing with pcie. If you want a better video card then you have now? No problem, just buy a new mobo, cpu, ram, for about $500, and then drop another $200-$400 on a pcie video card (or double that if you want SLI---which i am staring to think is a bunch of crap too-- i mean the finiancial department is wetting themselves over the thought of people dropping $1200 for 2 6800ultras).
Why didn't voodoo's SLI work out? Why don't we all have dual voodoo 10's in our rigs right now? Because i think it is all a load of steaming BS--a marketing gimmick to get people to buy more than they should. I think that ATI will eventually come out with some new silicon that (in single card config) beats two high-end nvidia cards in SLI mode. And then nvidia will try to out-perform ATI's offering and so on....and just maybe nvidia will go under like voodoo b/c nobody can afford 2 high-end video cards and all the other crap required to run them....and volari will reign as king over the graphic wars.
I would just like to see the agp8x bus pushed to it's max before we go switching to something else. There is a lot of room left for improvement, IMO.
I'm sorry Ryko, but that statement is patently false. SLI has real performance returns startingly similar to theoretical performance returns. a 90% increase in performance, and theoretical is 100%. I don't see how it's a gimmick. VooDoo SLI DID work out.. It was one of the most successful video adapters in HISTORY. People bought the cards in droves. We don't have dual anything in our system right now because AGP can't support SLI -- the transition killed the ingenuity.
we will see how long SLI will last....and do you really think nvidia actually cares about performance? all they care about is their bottom line. their bottom line took a huge hit with the craptastic fx series of cards, so to ensure that they don't end up in the red again, the want the performance lead. it's all economics really. nvidia will do whatever it takes to stay competitive in the marketplace to ensure their profits. however, they want to ensure their profits above anything else, even if they slip out of the performance lead, hence SLI. they just want you to spend more money...i.e. SLI = double the costs of a video card = more money for them.
nvidia exec1: hey, what the f**k are we going to do for next year?
nvidia exec2: i don't know? why don't we just sell people 2 cards instead of one. that way we would double our profits.
nvidia exec1: good idea. better change the connections though so people will have to but a new motherboard---with our newest and most expensive chipset. ahhh triple profits...
nvidia exec2: yeah, this is great. two is always better than one. every idiot knows that. i can't wait to buy my new beamer.
8x PCI Express slots have 4GB/s of bidirectional bandwidth. That's twice AGP 8x's 2.1GB/s, which is close to four times more than necessary to run an AGP card. Even if it isn't two slots using x16 bandwidth, the available bandwidth is MORE than sufficient to operate the cards. That doesn't make it a gimmick whatsoever. The result isn't a gimmick even if the marketing is. Just because one piece of the total scenario is screwy doesn't mean the full scenario is.
I don't give a crap if nVidia cares about performance or not. Bottom dollar says they do, as a slower card doesn't win the sales game, bottom line. But even so, the SLI PCIe results taken from real devices are approaching 85-90% performance gains over a single card. Perhaps this article will clear up your misconceptions about the technology, and this post about the numbers.
It's no gimmick. Even if the profit is high, the technology is still real, still intensely powerful.
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time ...
--Abraham Lincoln
Notice that 3Dfx is no longer around? They had top performance going for them. They just didn't pay enough attention to the business end. (A generalization, but generally true.) Read more here.
oh, i swear an ISA modem was hell of a lot better than those crap PCI ones.
What is there to encourage me to change?
When the performance gap starts opening up then you will see people make the move.
But since I don't buy the latest hardware anyway I figure that it will three or four years before this effects me. (anyone want to sell me their used NF3/A64 system?)