I hear you. The typical shit to force us users on buying new PCI-E motherboards. Bah. 😠

PCI-E will not be of any use for a while (if ever) so this decision is gonna cost 'em a certain percentage of the upgrade market. Sounds like this generation of nVidia hardware will not be too much to miss anyway 'cause the benchmarks thus far released show the card has to be running at 166x1200 with AA & AF in order to seriously outperform a 6800. The market is a strange one at present 'cause 'most' LCDs bought with systems for gaming have 1280x1024 native resolution and really the top of the range 6800/850 cards are almost too fast for this. The market certainly isn't crying out for a 7800 (or R520...) just yet so I reckon they should all should have saved their marketing budget and held off until the next technology refresh - in probably 6 months time eh 😀 There's no major game coming within 6 months to make the upgrade worthwhile if you're already running a top of the line card.

There were some oddball cards at a show back a few months with both AGP and PCI-E connectors. IIRC it was Gigabyte but I could be wrong (maybe MSI?! I can't recall). That's pretty smart engineering but I can't really see the point 😀

I see no reason to upgrade my AGP GeForce 6800 yet. Besides, Windows XP needs to be re-installed when you change mobo's and that is a PITA. Nothing like spending a week re-installing all my games.

I thought BTX mobos were coming soon? I was going to hold out for that form factor anyway.

Windows XP doesn't need to be re-installed when you change the motherboard. I recently swapped out a mobo, RAM, CPU combo set and I kept WinXP as is. Had no problems during the upgrade or since it was done.

There are articles on the web that show you how it can be done.

Reckless: But did you change motherboard chipset brands? (i.e. VIA to nVidia or Intel, etc.) That's what always killed it for me, since the chipset drivers get loaded before the OS even in safe mode.

of course there will be agp versions of both nvidia and ati cards. chip producers have nothing to say. these are card manufacturers that will decide.

robertmo: Of course, that's assuming that the chips will still work on AGP boards. I don't know enough about the technology, but I could envision that it's entirely possible for nVidia and/or ATI to make chips that just can't communicate over the AGP bus any more.

This is ridiculous. Think of the kinds of upgrades that people do before they do a major upgrade like a mother board. Usually RAM, HDD or graphics card. They are losing the sales of a lot of upgrades.

collector: I'm sure they've weighed the various factors. It's probably a lot more expensive to design and manufacture support for two different bus architectures, and it's obvious that PCI Express is going to take over in the next couple of years. Plus, motherboards by themselves are pretty cheap these days.

Also remember that ISA, VLB, and PCI are all obsolete PC buses used at one time for top-of-the-line video cards but have all since fallen by the wayside at one point or another. It may suck for a year or two, but it happens.

That said, I really wouldn't be surprised if most video card manufacturers keep producing current low- and medium-end models as AGP for another year or two, for the reasons you mention. With new top cards costing almost as much as the rest of the computer combined, however, there's just no reason for them to constrain their new designs to the limits of an inferior technology.

Personally, I plan to hold out with my 32-bit Athlon XP with Radeon 9800 Pro AGP system for a year or so, until all this dual-CPU (and/or dual-core single CPU) and SLI video card and PCI Express stuff gets more mature.

HunterZ wrote:

Reckless: But did you change motherboard chipset brands? (i.e. VIA to nVidia or Intel, etc.) That's what always killed it for me, since the chipset drivers get loaded before the OS even in safe mode.

The 'trick' is to do a Windows XP repair install which is like an upgrade install but instead it goes back to the versdion of your CD (you'll need to reapply SP + hotfixes afterwards). Here's a guide: http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1755&page=5

Also read/act upon the content of http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=312369

I understand releasing new video cards, but I can game (maybe not the best) on my compy, which is in specs. My brother plays each game he has max graphics with a 6800 GT. Why go waste 1000 dollars on something that will be 800 tomorrow?

Agreed. My ATi Radeon 9600 is still performing just right for my needs.