According to the recent poll here, 63% of us are still on AGP and feel no compelling need to upgrade at least right now. My 3.6GHz P4 NW works just fine thanks, especially with the Gainward 7800GS+ I popped in last week. It has a G71/7900GT core (24 pipelines), with a simple pencil mod is running at 7900GTX speeds (650/1600), and runs everything I throw at it at 1280x1024 with all eyecandy maxed out. Smooth as silk. The highest temp I've recorded with this card is 53C, after a 2 1/2 hour gaming session. Just an amazing piece of work from Gainward.

The card is not being sold in North America, but a few dealers are shipping them to the U.S. (I got mine from OcUK).

As for PCI-E, I'm going to wait a year or so until all the new stuff (cpus/chipsets/mobos/DX10/Vista/etc etc) is sorted out.

Too late for me. I've spent the last several weeks reading TR reviews to make my choice. I've been wanting to upgrade my dual monitor mpx chipset duallie rig so I could play some directX 9 OpenGL 2.0 games. I ordered a SAPPHIRE 100131SL Radeon X800GTO 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 AGP 4X/8X a couple days ago. I'm hoping the 2D dual monitor support will be good enough (replaces Matrox P750) that I can live with it at 1600x1200x32-bit.

I'm still waiting for an AGP 7600GS or GT, but if this comes first then I will pick up one of these.

I'm waiting for the AGP version of GF7600GT and some hardware site to do some sort of comparison with the PCI-Express version. (To give me an idea of how much of a performance hit is to be expected)

I'll be interested in seeing the benchies from this. A lot of us are still stuck with a Radeon 9800 generation or maybe even older. With no plans to actually do a more thorough upgrade until next year when Vista ships, it would be nice to breath new life in my aging computer.

Just drop the price of the 7800GS and everyone will be happy.

With PCIe 7900GT selling for $230, there is no reason that they can't sell the GS for $200 and corner the market.

Nice to still see AGP support with new cards, but it really is investing in an old technology and if you play games there's a fair chance you'll want to upgrade the CPU at some point too - today that means a new motherboard and PCIe. Might as well do the whole lot at once.

Says me with the over 3 year old Athlon computer with 9500! heh. I really should do something about that, but it works fine still apart from modern games.

Yay! Maybe I should upgrade the MX4000 in my file server?

It's kinda ugly how the AGP market does get a few new SKUs every now and then, but only moves sideways from a performance standpoint. If you don't mind the heat, an old NV40 could be a better buy.

I'm sure many users of older mb's will be pleased, but while ATI is doing this, I wonder if they can also come out with a decent mid-range card for pci-e?

Gimme on in silent pipe quietness and I'll bite

Took them long enough.

Were AGP versions delayed in order to 'force' as many as possible to upgrade to PCIe systems, and now they're going after the sizable, remaining AGP market?

Or did these huge industry leaders actually under-estimate the demand for AGP parts?