If you"re still using an AGP motherboard and feel you"ve been getting the short end of the graphics card stick recently, Sapphire might have a few products of interest for you. The company known for making graphics cards and motherboards based on ATI technology (as well as ATI"s own branded video cards) has announced X1300 Pro and X1600 Pro AGP models, much to the delight of cash-strapped gamers not wishing to part with their current hardware just yet.
The designs stray slightly from the ATI reference designs to make room for the PCI-E to AGP bridge chip which allows the natively PCI-E GPUs to communicate with the AGP bus. Aside from this difference the cards are essentially the same, sporting the same clock speeds and theoretically identical performance.
The AGP interface got a shot in the arm earlier this year with the introduction of NVIDIA"s 7800 GS, an AGP only card which uses the same graphics technology of NVIDIA"s high end 7800 GT and GTX, which are PCI-E exclusives.
While ATI"s X1000 product lines don"t officially include AGP support, it did not prohibit its card partners to develop their own cards. Consequently, Sapphire has not ruled out the possibility of higher end models coming to AGP in the future.
See the DailyTech article for exclusive photos.