In the market for a new video card.

[drothgery]

Did I happen to sleep through this transition???? Granted, I'm not an avid follower of hardware (as I should be), but has AGP gone by the wayside, similar to the ISA boards??? What are the advantages of PCI Express, and does it require better MB's?????

Well, it was ISA to the short-lived VLB to PCI to AGP. Intel kicked off the transition to PCI Express late this spring with the launch of its 915 and 925 chipsets and slightly higher-clocked Pentium 4s to go with them. There aren't any production Athlon 64 motherboards that support PCI Express yet, though ATi, VIA, and NVidia have announced products (ATi's, suprisingly, seem to be the closest to shipping).

My guesses

• Intel-based PCs will almost all be PCI Express (or inegrated-graphics only) by the end of 2005. They want to see this happen, and own the chipset space for their CPUs, so they will.
• There won't be any Sempron/Athlon XP chipsets that are PCI Express capable (possibly SiS or ALi will throw one together late, but it won't be very good), so low end and midrange AMD-based PCs will stick with AGP for at least the next year.
• Athlon 64-based PCs will be mostly PCI Express by next year; the only exceptions will be homebrews and Sempron 3100 (or other A64-based Sempron) boxes.

PCI Express x16 (which is what's used for PCI Express video cards; PCI Expresss x1 is supposed to replace other PCI cards). PCI Express, though, doesn't seem to show any noticeable benefit in current games (except for allowing SLI with the right motherboard and a high-end NVidia card). Much like AGP 8X.