But no matter what the real reasons for replacing AGP were beside of also selling new motherboards, nVIDIA contrary to ATI did the mistake not caring about the platform anymore whilst there are a lot of systems around which still have a fast enough CPU, which often was the argumentation (that the CPUs beeing available on AGP aren't fast enough for modern games) for not supporting the platform anymore and as i said there are tons of examples for how you can benefit from the latest gfx card generation in an AGP sytem and that the CPU/memory bandwith also isn't the real problem.
Same goes for the higher power supply in PCIe, somehow irrelevant as most gfx cards still need the additional 4pin power cable beeing attached. Only the slower mainstream products are satisfied with the power PCIe delivers. Now the 3850 is only one geneation behind and offers quite some bang for the buck, not so good power consumpten and ATI's driver support for AGP can be a pain. My GeForce3 stills works like a dream there with the latest nVidia drivers. Probably the best gfx card i ever bought, in respect of the time i used it in a reasonable way.
Same goes for the higher power supply in PCIe, somehow irrelevant as most gfx cards still need the additional 4pin power cable beeing attached. Only the slower mainstream products are satisfied with the power PCIe delivers. Now the 3850 is only one geneation behind and offers quite some bang for the buck, not so good power consumpten and ATI's driver support for AGP can be a pain. My GeForce3 stills works like a dream there with the latest nVidia drivers. Probably the best gfx card i ever bought, in respect of the time i used it in a reasonable way.