B for me. The switch to PCIe roughly corresponded with me finishing high school, and moving to my own PC and away from the family PC. My family upgraded every four years and our last agp system was a P4 with a Radeon 9800 pro. We got that in early ‘04, and I built my first PC in mid-2008 with an 8800gt in it (unfortunately that is the only spec I can remember). Like Dominus, I actually switched to an iMac shortly after, as I was not having a bar of Windows Vista, and was more interested in music production than gaming at the time. I dual booted that iMac with windows XP so I could still play a few older titles, Civilisation IV and battlefield 1942 being my main choices at the time and that served me very well until late 2016 😄

I kept agp from 2002 up to 2005.
Started with a 9700 pro and after that died I swapped it for a 6600 GT, then after that died too I moved to a new system with PCIe.
I'm surprised by the fact that the P4 served me for that long without me complaining too much if anything.

I purchased a brand new system with AGP in 2004: ABit kv8 pro, athlon 64 2800, geforce 6600gt - simply because pci-express was commanding a huge premium back than. I stayed on the same AGP video card until 2006 when I upgraded to a E6400+AW9D-MAX+7600gt and was very happy! Performance was excellent in all the games I played. Still have both platforms today.

I had an Socket A Athlon 1700+ with an AGP Radeon 9800 pro on an Nforce2 platform to start off 2004. I upgraded the CPU to a Barton 2500+ in March and overclocked FSB to 400MHz. I wanted to keep the NForce 2 platform because the copper spidf out fit with my setup in a way that I loved, but wasn't completely thrilled with the build. That motherboard still works, but I had to recap it in 2020. I don't overclock it anymore.

After Halflife 2 came out, I felt like things were not as smooth as they should be, (and the video card was too hot) so I upgraded to a socket 939 Athlon64 3200+ with a PCIe Radeon 800xl on an ASUS Nforce 4 motherboard . It was an expensive upgrade at the time, I was disappointed that the Nforce 4 didn't have a copper spidf out for my receiver, so I added a turtle beach card in early 2005. The new motherboard also came with SATA, so that also helped me make the jump and I felt like quality of the games begged for the upgrade. The 939 motherboard & Radeon 800xl combo lasted for 5 years as my main system (with an upgrade to an Opteron 175 in early 2006). A lightning strike burned out one of the on board lan ports cards in 2007, but the board had dual jacks, so it was blessed to continue. Used it as my TV for a couple years with a usb2 ATSC tuner. Never took advantage of the SLI on the nforce 4 motherboard though. My kids got to use that Nforce 4 board from 2010 through 2016 when Window 10 finally delegated it to being unpleasant.

I always thought that AGP was a mess, with most of it's features missing the mark or the market, but I was gaming a lot at the time and I had a home rig and a LAN party rig and I went through a lot of equipment between 1999 and 2005. I stated with a Rage II Agp that I got for free, upgraded to a Voodoo 3 2000 AGP (giant boost in performance), Asus Riva TNT 2 (serviceable but finicky, probably because it was on an OC's Celeron 300a), tried an ATI Rage 128 pro for a minute, enjoyed my Geforce 3 ti200 with my early Athlon XP builds until it burned out, and the same with the Geforce 4 4400 (until it also burned out) before getting the 9800XP. That's why I was nervous about the VGA card heat, but honestly, smoking and cats and no air conditioning in the summer were likely contributing factors for the 200x video card deaths as well.

I know this topic is old, but I just wanted to share my experience. I remember having a 754 system with a Sempron and a 6600GT AGP from BFG which I had a lot of fun with playing FS2004, Doom 3, Farcry, COD, Warcraft 3, etc. Well, that setup got stolen when moving from one place to another. The next setup was an early socket 775 Pentium D 805, and a Radeon 3850 PCIE which lasted me for many years until it died together with the rest of the system due to a problem with the electricity service.

With my next purchase I sticked with mainstream tier, and bought a rather exotic middle of the road Radeon R7 260 1GB DDR5 PCIE from Asus, which is silent and works excelent for Windows XP up to Windows 7 era of gaming. 😀

My last AGP Desktop had Athlon XP 2500+ and Radeon 9700 Pro. After that I had a gaming laptop. Then another gaming laptop. When I went back to desktops I built a top-end Core 2 Quad Qx9650 system with dual 8800 GTS 512 in SLI. That machine lasted me 12 years, with one GPU upgrade along the way

I did "A". I upgraded from a Celeron 1.3 GHz and a Radeon 7500 to a Celeron D 3.33GHz and a Radeon x1900 GT on an Asrock ConroeXFire-ESATA2 simultaneously. I stayed on Windows XP until the release of Windows 7. It was quite the upgraded in performance.

I believe I went from Radeon 9550 AGP to GeForce 7800GT PCIe.

I never upgraded to PCIe and have stuck with AGP on my upgraded AM2 system. It is using a 7000's series GeForce card. It does all I need it to using Ubuntu, with an ever so decreasing needs to dual boot into WinXP.

feipoa wrote on 2025-06-01, 05:57:

It is using a 7000's series GeForce card. It does all I need it to using Ubuntu

Wait your mean for non retro use? And you get acceptable rendering speed for modern web browsing with a 4 core athlon and 8Gb ddr2 or whatever the maximum for this system is?

Bruno128 wrote on 2025-06-01, 13:11:

feipoa wrote on 2025-06-01, 05:57:

It is using a 7000's series GeForce card. It does all I need it to using Ubuntu

Wait your mean for non retro use? And you get acceptable rendering speed for modern web browsing with a 4 core athlon and 8Gb ddr2 or whatever the maximum for this system is?

Yes, I use it for regular use, nothing retro. AsRock 939DualSata2 with an AM2CPU card. 8 GB DDRII 800. The trick for graphics is to use a GF 7 series. Some graphics cards, like the Radeon 4000 series, have lousy nouveau drivers (and no proprietary driver options for new Ubuntu distros) Even GF6 6600GT won't work well. You can get laggy display menu scrolling, or issues in the browsers, or inability to accelerate videos, either directly, or in browser. I spent A LOT of time fussing about with AGP graphics cards and wish there had been a GF8 series bridged on AGP. I know there were some GF8 cards on PCI, but it didn't work right on this system.

I landed on a relatively weak GeForce 7600GS with NV4B core, mainly because the faster GF7 cards don't help much and consume more power. For the CPU, I am using an AM2: ADA6000IAA6CZ, 3.0 GHz, dual core, and 2x 1024K at 89 W. There's a 3.2 GHz option, but at 125 W may be too power full (I burned out an AM2CPU card with it).

It is a fairly rare combination of hardware to leave running 24/7. It's been running for several years like this. I am thinking I should find a replacement, not because I find the system too slow, but because I don't want it to break and be bummed about it.

feipoa wrote on 2025-06-01, 13:35:

I am thinking I should find a replacement, not because I find the system too slow, but because I don't want it to break and be bummed about it.

Yeah those AM2CPU risers go for verrrry steep price, it will buy you a great modern system for daily tasks

Only generation that I upgraded to the max was Socket A AMD Athlon XP AGP machine that got ATI Radeon 3860 AGP the fastest AGP and a mobile CPU that got overclocked to the max in desktop motherboard. Next level was Core2Duo last generation E8600 with a PCIe Geforce 9600GT The jump was enormeous. Still use it as a daily driver. Windows 10 runs just fine. Windows 7 is snappier.

Answer is C!

And as it so happens, the Asrock 775Dual-VSTA was actually the motherboard for my first computer!

Initially i had convinced my mom to let me buy a GeForce 7800 GS for her Dell workstation, with my own savings, to which she agreed. So still being a teenager in school, when the time came for me to build my own computer, I obviously wanted to save money and take it with me, but of course I also wanted to have one of those new Core 2 Duo's I'd been hearing about. The 775Dual-VSTA ended up being the obvious choice and i ended up pairing it with a Core 2 Duo E6700.

I guess 5 years late would be B?

I've never actually upgraded base platform for the graphics card. The new graphics card would be bought with a new base. The base was reason for purchase - graphics just went along with it.

I had ran my i845 from 2001 to 2008 with Matrox Millenium G400 and GeForce3 Ti200 later on. 8600GT bought with Q35 board. Then in 2015 GTX960 bought with X99S board.

I still use that base, and have bought 2nd hand 1070Ti from a good friend couple of years ago cheap.

Between 1996 and 2001 I switched more video cards and slot standards than in following 25 years.