Pci-express

[splox]

~~~pc~specs~~~
Cooler Master Elite Case
2 Ultra Dual ball bearing case fans
Asus A8R-MVP Motherboard
Ultra X3 600W Modular Power Supply
Western Digital Caviar Black OEM Hard Drive 7200rpm 32mb Sata-3gbs (x3)
Sony BWU200S Blu-Ray Internal Burner
Sound Blaster Audigy SE
King of Socket 939 Athlon 64 FX-60 Toledo
2GB of Crucial Balistix Ultra Low Latency Memory
Windows Media Center 2005
Front Bay Multi Card Reader
Hisdigital Radeon HD 3870 IceQ3 512mb GDDR4

Here is my question: The way I feel is since my motherboard does not support PCI-Express 2.0 that I should stay away from upgrades to my video card. I mean why buy a card and then only get half of what you paid for? And most of my pc games recommended requirements are for radeon x1950 series anyway or before that even. I mostly like racing games, tony hawk's good, golf games tiger woods being favorite, I am a rally fanatic!, fishing games,I have in front of me quake 4 and unreal tournament, and to sum up my games I have and like to play Medal of Honor Allied Assault and its expansion pack - spearhead.
But as you can see my mainboard does not support pci-e 2.0 but my video card does. Would you say that I should just stick with my current card (listed up top in my system specs)? Or should I go ahead and step up to the "HisDigital Radeon HD 4870"? As I was pointing out I guess my games don't need it? (FYI: No X2 cards and no Crossfire for me!) I also pointed out that my motherboard does not have pci-express 2.0 and finally I have a "square" not a "widescreen" lcd made by nec thats relatively brand new and runs on 1280x1024 resolution. And most of my games dont run a widescreen resolution. And I only use the blu-ray burner to burn data files - no blue ray movies watched in HI-DEF or anything of the such. So
1. mainboard does not have pci-express 2.0
2. square lcd running at 1280x1024
3. most of my games were made before the HD 3870 let alone the HD 4870 this question is about

Thanks for your time answering this my name is splox by the way and this is my first post. Have a great day!!

[mjc]

I'd say don't do anything and start saving for a total rebuild in the near future...

[jlreich]

I don't think we are even using the bandwidth provided by PCIe 1.0 yet, so no worries about the card not getting used to it's full potential in that respect.

But I do agree with MJC on just saving up for a new system. s939 while an excellent platform in it's day is getting very long in the tooth. Although your FX60 is quite the CPU it is not up to todays standards and you are pretty much maxed out, and DDR-400 is so three years ago.

But all in all for the games you play it is not something you need to do right away. Your current system can handle all of the games you listed with no problems. I wouldn't upgrade anything, but rather start saving for a new system in the not so near future. You can then take advantage of all the newest technologies without worrying about any old bottlenecks holding you back.

Sit tight and start saving some cash. When you get a new game that stresses your system and performance lags break open the piggy bank and go shopping. :)

[saphalline]

I'd say don't do anything and start saving for a total rebuild in the near future...I agree. I have a system remarkably similar to yours and that's what I'm doing.

I don't think we are even using the bandwidth provided by PCIe 1.0 yetNot true. Tom's did a comprehensive test when the first wave of PCIe 2.0 products were released, and they found a marked decrease in performance with a certain game.

M$'s Flight Sim X Deluxe on full settings saturated a PCIe 2.0 slot that was manually truncated to x8 (equivalent bandwidth to a PCIe 1.1 x16 slot). This is to be expected with all the scenery in FS X, but it just goes to show you that raw texture data is worrisome to transfer over PCIe 1.x! And with games moving towards 4K x 4K textures...

GPU's have long been capable of extremely small compression ratios for all types of data, but that doesn't preclude the initial transferring of data. And procedurally generated data types all (currently) require a larger prototype for the best image quality. But of course in the case of flight sims, where performance must often be sacrificed for image quality, resources increase exponentially with larger viewing distances. The same could be said for other sims such as Sim City 4, where raw texture data was a tremendous limiting factor for the visuals of the game. As long as compromises must be made, bandwidth will be in short supply.

PCIe 2.0 is needed right now.