AGP was skipped, my family went from ISA/VLB on a 486 to PCI-E +P4 in 2005 or so 🤣

C. -> ASRock ALiveDual-eSATA2

- used AGP card (X800GTO) from old system with this "new" board (bought it used)
- switched to newer AGP card (HD3850)
- AGP card died (no more sure if it was the X800 or the HD3850 which died between switching PC off and on but one replaced the other)
- switched to PCIe card (HD7750)
- switched to newer PCIe card (RX470)

Still using it like this today with a quad-core Phenom II 910e and 8 GB RAM.
Great board, I especially bought it for this reason of being able to upgrade from AGP to PCIe when time comes.
Only downside is that it doesn't support six-core Phenoms. Then it could run forever 😉

Close to a decade late, but I got there eventually 😁

-Got essentially scammed into buying a new AGP system in ~2006
-Bought a gaming laptop ~2009 (geforce 9600M graphics card was actually removable, but I never found any outlet that would sell one at the time)
-Finally switched to a proper PCIe system at around 2012 when I got an actually decent PC

My first PCIE setup was an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ on an Asus A8N SLI Deluxe ( socket 939).

My first PCIE video card was a Geforce 7800GT, which had just come out. I believe it was an MSI.

Prior to that, I had a Radeon 9700 (Sapphire, AFAICR) on a Northwood P4 2.8GHz + Asus P4P800 Deluxe.

It was an expensive transition, but I had no issues.

EDIT: So option A, in my case.

D. Remained on IGP (Shuttle SV25 Tualatin motherboard with onboard Savage 3D)

The reason was that there were no decent CPUs for a long time. (Pentium 4, first x64 from AMD)
Next systems I got were an AMD E-350 until I got my still used i7-4770k.

I was looking for a hybrid mobo, but did not like their performance, so I stayed with my PCI/AGP combo and only got a used PC with PCIE maybe 5 years ago.
Nothing exciting, really - when the high performance graphics cards started costing as much as a new PC itself, I just left the race to the top.

I bought a new socket A board in '03, so I was on AGP until '08 when I upgraded to socket AM2+. I got by with an FX 5700 until the upgrade when I got a 7600GT. Back then I think I was playing more Sega Saturn games than PC games anyway (Saturn imports were cheap then).

B. Stayed AGP for a couple more years. (maybe with later Radeon HD AGP offerings)

I went directly from a Radeon 9800 Pro to a Radeon HD 4870 as I gamed a lot less. So it was not a problem to keep the old system.

I was using older hardware so I didn't face that transition until after it was over for most people.

My last new motherboard for many years was a super socket 7. After that I wasn't real interested in buying the newest stuff, but I was buying and selling a lot of used parts on eBay so my PC changed frequently. My final AGP setup was an nForce2, Mobile Barton CPU and a Radeon 9800 Pro. That was a great system.
I was happy with it until youtube switched to H.264 and I couldn't play their videos anymore. I was so behind the curve that a web site abandoned me.

When I finally bought a new motherboard it was an AM3 Phenom2. I was only playing Morrowind so I didn't need a video card upgrade, but I was faced with the switch to Express. Besides budget, I also worried about the reliability of high powered gaming cards. I was used to having backup hardware around, but with PCI-Express I had nothing.

So I decided to buy a cheap card to start, with a bigger card to be bought someday in the future whenever I actually needed it. My reasoning was that low end cards are usually reliable, so it would make a good fallback if my future "big" card turned up dead one random day.
I loved my 9800 Pro, so I wanted to stay with ATI. So I bought a cheap Radeon HD4350 as my "starter" card. By chaining together some benchmark tests (hard to find for low end cards), I decided it was faster than the 9800 Pro so that was good enough for me. I figured after I bought an HD5750/5770 or whatever, the 4350 would be my fallback that wouldn't require different drivers.

I ended up getting irritated with the 4350. It had some flickering surfaces in games, and there was some problem with dual monitors (don't remember the specifics on that one). It didn't live up to my good experience with the 9800 Pro. So when I did buy a "serious" card, I bought an NVidia GTX260, not a Radeon. Thus my "fallback" 4350 card ended up being an inconvenient oddball. It's the only ATI/AMD Express graphics card I have, still.

I never got engaged with early PCI Express cards. My exposure to those generations was as late AGP models instead.

Disruptor wrote on 2024-02-26, 10:21:

D. Remained on IGP (Shuttle SV25 Tualatin motherboard with onboard Savage 3D)

The reason was that there were no decent CPUs for a long time. (Pentium 4, first x64 from AMD)
Next systems I got were an AMD E-350 until I got my still used i7-4770k.

I have friends who had an E-350 based desktop system and my wife had a C-60 based netbook. Those were painful when they came out and have only gone downhill since, IMHO. AFAICR, they were very inexpensive, though and the onboard GPU was apparently well matched to the CPU, performance-wise. https://www.anandtech.com/show/4134/the-brazo … n-for-miniitx/5

Did you use a PCIE GPU in that E-350 ? If so, which one and how was it ?

darry wrote on 2024-02-26, 13:31:

I have friends who had an E-350 based desktop system and my wife had a C-60 based netbook. Those were painful when they came out and have only gone downhill since, IMHO. AFAICR, they were very inexpensive, though and the onboard GPU was apparently well matched to the CPU, performance-wise. https://www.anandtech.com/show/4134/the-brazo … n-for-miniitx/5

Did you use a PCIE GPU in that E-350 ? If so, which one and how was it ?

No, i have used the IGP.

Wasn't exactly using Intel at the time. Netburst was expensive and underwhelming, and high power draw made systems noisy too.

My last main AGP system was an nForce2 system with GeForce4Ti and an AXP2500+ overclocked to 200MHz FSB (i.e. 3200+).
Next system was So939 Athlon64. I forget exactly which CPU - iirc went for a single-core first then upgraded to X2 4400 quite soon aftewards. GPU was 6600GT. Ironically I had an Asrock 939Dual-VSTA motherboard which had both AGP and PCIe slots, but I just went with PCIe.

So that could qualify as A, B or C 😉

I had the money for a major upgrade in early 2006, so I moved from a Socket A system (8RDA3+, Mobile Athlon, 9800 Pro) to 939. Epox 9NPA3 Ultra, 3200+, and a PCIe 6800 GS 256 megabyte.

I had athlon64 3500+ and MSI K8T Neo2 with 6800gt so i bought asus A8N SE and 7900gs . Thats how i migrated to pciE.

Went from a mid-2004 Athlon 3000 + X800XT AGP combo to an Opteron 185 w/ 8800GTS SLI setup in early 2007. I got the Opteron and S939 SLI board super cheap because AM2 and Core 2 had already launched. The video cards were anything but cheap though; think I was only a month shy of the much cheaper (and cooler, and faster, and fully H264ify'ed) G92 version.

I had a limited upgrade budget at the time since I was an undergrad student, so I went with an ASRock 939 Dual SATA II motherboard and a 3800+ X2 CPU and kept my Radeon 9700 Pro when I finally upgraded from Socket A back in late 2006. A few months later I'd saved up enough for a PCI-E EVGA 7900 GS, which was a fairly substantial upgrade and slotted into that motherboard quite nicely. I still have that motherboard/CPU combo as a retro PC, although now it's got an ATI X1900XTX which I wanted at the time but could never afford.

My memory is hazy, but I’m pretty certain that I held onto AGP until I retired my 9800 XT, which I “think” was replaced by a pair of Gainward Bliss 7800GT cards.

So “B”.

A) Switched platform probably in early 2006:

Went from:

Athlon XP-M 2500+ (@2500MHz)
ABIT NF7 V2.0
GeForce 6600GT AGP

to

Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (@2500MHz)
Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9
GeForce 6800GS PCI-E

the last AGP card I got when new was the 6800 128mb, it was a popular option on forums because it was relatively cheap and often could unlock the extra pipelines and vertex shader units and overclock some, after that I don't think the AGP options appealed to me when new compared to PCIE cards