6800gt prices/questions

[Taurus]

any idea why an average 6800GT PCI-E is roughly $50 more than the AGP model? same clock speeds, right? what gives? when it comes to the 6600GT or 6800ULTRA versions, prices are only $5-10 different.

also, are there any issues with having two cards from different brands? say, if one is bought now and another a year and a half from now. is the SLI standard pretty set?

thanks.

 

[trainmaster77]

any idea why an average 6800GT PCI-E is roughly $50 more than the AGP model? same clock speeds, right? what gives? when it comes to the 6600GT or 6800ULTRA versions, prices are only $5-10 different.

also, are there any issues with having two cards from different brands? say, if one is bought now and another a year and a half from now. is the SLI standard pretty set?

thanks.

price and demand my friend. There are probably zillions more agp mobos. Its my understanding that pci-e is the standard since its twice as fast as agp 8x.

The clock speeds on the board are indeed as fast, but pci-e can pipeline the video twice as fast as the agp 8x counterpart.

 

[Tuffgong4]

as of today there is no performance benefit for pci-express over agp, there will be in the future but not at the moment.

There could be many reasons why the pci-e is more expensive as of right now mainly it's just supply and demand. If Nvidia is shipping closer to what is being bought there are going to be less available and higher price. Also the most popular combo for sli motherboards right now are two 6800GTs so instead of the demand being just one card per customer it's now two. So the supply is being eaten up faster.

Another reason may be that I think the 6800GTs that are shipping for pci-e are using a bridge chip which means they are natively agp but with the bridge chip it can support pci-e. Adding that chip to the pcb will increase cost for the manufacturers and the price goes up a little bit

 

[Taurus]

Another reason may be that I think the 6800GTs that are shipping for pci-e are using a bridge chip which means they are natively agp but with the bridge chip it can support pci-e. Adding that chip to the pcb will increase cost for the manufacturers and the price goes up a little bit

i thought about this, but i thought that the cards would be natively pci-i and were adapted to agp, not the other way around. either way, IF the 6800gt's are like that, wouldn't the 6800ultras and 6600gt's be the same way?

i checked a few months ago and pci-e cards were more like $70-80 more so the gap is closing. i guess it's just a matter of time.