Is it worth waiting for PCI-Express ?

[flappo]

Hi all

I'm in the market for a dual G5 after waiting untold ages ( boght a 17" imac in the interim -bit slow ) and I'm just wondering if I should wait until say , Feb 05 and see if PCI-Express comes out on the mac ?

I'd like my purchase to be as future proof as possible and last min 3-4 years.

I was thinking of buying the dual 2.5 w/ 23" and Geforce6800

Would that last me ?

I don't do anything partic. heavy with my mac. , but who knows what the OS demands will be in say 2 years ??

Please help !

 

[JFreak]

currently the bus is not a bottleneck, so i'd say don't wait.

 

[flappo]

You mean the agp8x ?

Yeah , I heard that half the cards aboot don't even saturate the 4x

Why is that ?

And what on earth could require an agp 16x anyway ?

 

[solvs]

Tom's Hardware and Barefeats have some good info on this stuff. Google it.

But at this point it doesn't matter. In the future... who knows.

I say if you can afford it now, buy it. It will be fast. Very fast. A dual 2.5 with a 6800 will be fast enough to do almost anything you need. Especially if you can plug up the real bottlenecks, like the hard drive. Like with a 10,000 RPM WD Raptor. CPU intensive audio/imaging/video/CAD notwithstanding, but even that.

If you can wait til August.

 

[Sun Baked]

currently the bus is not a bottleneck, so i'd say don't wait.

Right now, but with Core Image/Video there is a good chance AGP bus will be an eventual bottleneck as developers pick up on it.

There is also the chance that developers will wait.

Uploads to GPU fast, downloads from GPU slow under AGP. PCI-e should be much faster in both directions.

 

[Grimace]

I know there are some who will disagree, but if you aren't using serious graphics-intensive apps, the difference won't matter. If I had the money, I would get a new 2.5Ghz in a second. Buy one and tell us how incredible it is!!

 

[invaLPsion]

A review from Anandtech shows that PCIe has no significant improvements or benefits at this time. Even games like Farcry and X2 run the same or better on AGP8x. This may change later when the graphics and programs get more intensive.

 

[flappo]

I know there are some who will disagree, but if you aren't using serious graphics-intensive apps, the difference won't matter. If I had the money, I would get a new 2.5Ghz in a second. Buy one and tell us how incredible it is!!

i will

 

[yamabushi]

The current top of the line model will be more than powerful enough for most users for at least the near future. Go ahead and buy it. While graphics crads will be transitioning to PCI-Express in the future the last of the AGP cards will still offer competitive perfomance for some time to come.

PCI-Express will begin to show advantages as it is moves beyond the graphics slot and is implemented throughout the chipset on the motherboard. It could also eventually displace PCI-X for other add in cards. This will improve overall system perfomance to some extent by avoiding I/O bus sharing as well as increasing bandwidth. Nevertheless most users probably won't notice the improvement unless they regularly transfer large amounts of data. Also, the hard drive will still be the main bottleneck in the system even with a fast internal RAID.