Vendors gear up for PCI-Express 2

THE MURKY WORLD of Taiwanese graphics rumour-mongering currently puts Nvidia's first round of PCI-Express 2.0 cards on the market by October.

That's if OCWorkbench has gotten it right.

8x00 series cards should be rolling out on a PCI-E 2 interface as Q4 rolls in, just in time to plug into the new wave of Intel and Nvidia motherboards that will be supporting the new standard. Indeed, Intel's P35 chipset already has compatibility, RD790 will support it on the Red side, and Nvidia has already got internal boards working, we hear.

Version 2 of the spec increases speeds, providing double the signaling throughput (2.5GT/s up to 5GT/s).

The GeForce 9800 will almost certainly lead as a PCI-E 2 part, with a PCI-E standard variant for backwards compatibility. Don't expect the new revision to become the popular standard anytime soon, though - years after it was supposed to have died a death, new graphics boards are still appearing on AGP. Like the famous peasant in Monty Python's Holy Grail, it seems that AGP is not yet dead. µ