New video cards for AGP would be expensive I'd think. AGP due to lack of demand should come at a premium.
Nah. AGP is a dying standard. Some AGP cards will inevitably be expensive because they will be 'up-to-date' but these cards are no more expensive than their PCI-E equivalents.
Now PCI-E is becoming the mainstream. I built my system to use AGP about 4 years ago, so I'm looking at mostly older cards. Radeon 9250, 9550, 9800, X1650, etc. Obviously I didn't want anything less than what I have even if what I have is a broken piece of shit. So I'm going with an HIS Ati Radeon X1650 Pro card. I looked at two by Sapphire first, one reportedly had a fuck-ton of overheating issues, but was otherwise good, and the other was the same shit but had a whole new cooling unit. The second looked promising, but there were no reviews or ratings, I was going to go with that until I seen a cheap PSU and jumped on the nice looking HIS model. I was only turned away from that in the first place because of it's power needs. I don't have any PCI-E slots, so that's not much of an option, and my system is out of date, so I'm basically just getting a temporary installment to tie me over until I've got the time and money for a new gig.
My 40 GB HDD just aint doing it anymore; I find myself burning a lot of DVD's it seems... My PSU is great, it just can't support much more than what I got. I seen a good looking cheap one so I went with that so I am able to use a better card.
To be honest, there really isn't much of a selection in the AGP world anymore either. From what I seen, most of the Nvidia chipset selection was pretty crappy too. The best I could find was the ATI cards. It's not that way with PCI-E. I can only get so good a card in this system before having to upgrade the ENTIRE system. lol.
What 420 said about his friend holds true for me as well. It's just easier for me to buy an $80 dollar AGP card for an older system, than to build a whole new one. At the moment, I'll just hold off until I've got the dollars to spend on what I really want in a system. With audio being a whole new focus for me, it will probably be more expensive than the last time. I feel that if I am going to build a whole new system I might as well not feel any regret for holding off on a few things I want just to save some money and, instead, spend however much is needed for me to satisfy my needs and preferences.
