With the 915/925 platform Intel has removed the AGP slot completely off the board and with newer CPUs only appearing in the LGA775 form, the Intel enthusiast has no option but to upgrade to a PCI-Express card for now. But that’s not a bad thing at all considering the fact that PCI Express x16 delivers twice the throughput than AGP 8X and both ATI and nVidia have their solutions available in the PCI-E flavor.

AGP (Top) vs PCI-E (Bottom)

The PCI Express x16 Slot

That is precisely what we’re looking at today- a performance evaluation of the different ATI and nVidia PCI-Express cards. We have a total of four cards with us out of which, two are reference cards- 6800GT from nVidia and x800 XT from ATI. Both these cards are identical in features to the highest-end models from these respective companies- the 6800 Ultra and the x800 XT Platinum Edition with the only difference being the core and memory speeds.

The Reference 6800GT Card

The Reference x800 XT Card

The 6800GT very easily overclocked to Ultra clock speeds and since there is no difference between itself and the Ultra, we decided to include a virtual 6800 Ultra card in our tests as well. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find any overclocking applications for the x800 XT PCI-E. Using ones that work with AGP cards like ATI Tools and PowerStrip resulted in a system crash every time we tried to increase the core/memory speed. We also contacted ATI but they didn’t have anything readily available either. We’re sure that with time, we will find applications that overclock this card.

MSI 5750 Card

MSI x600 XT Card

The other two cards that we're looking at today were provided to us by MSI and are based on the ATI x600XT and nVidia 5750 GPUs. Since not everyone will be able to afford the high-end/high-priced cards, a need for such mainstream cards exist. While these cards will not provide the option of playing Far Cry in all its might and glory, they do an adequate job for the average gamer.
 

For benchmarking we've selected the following applications:

Far Cry:	1024 x 768 and 1200 x 1600 resolutions at no AA, 2x AA + 4x AF and 4x AA + 8x AF
Unreal Tournament 2004:	1024 x 768 and 1200 x 1600 resolutions at no AA, 2x AA + 4x AF and 4x AA + 8x AF
Halo:	1024 x 768 and 1200 x 1600 resolutions at no AA, 2x AA + 4x AF and 4x AA + 8x AF
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness:	1024 x 768 and 1200 x 1600 resolutions at no AA, 2x AA + 4x AF and 4x AA + 8x AF
3D Mark 2001SE:	Default Settings
Aquamark3:	Default Settings
3D Mark 2003:	Fill Rates (Single/Multi Texture), Vertex Shader, Pixel Shader 2.0
SpecViewPERF 7.11:	Default Settings.

If you would like for us to add any additional benchmarking software, please email us at suggestions@tbreak.com