DaJMastaPart of it is that ATI(AMD) and nVidia haven't been making AGP bus based cards since the 9x00 series and the nVidia 5xx0 series. Since then, board manufacturers have been on their own to design AGP compatible boards, and have to add in an AGP bridge chip.... so instead of going with the provided reference design, they have to fund making one themselves, testing it, and the new components.

While that drives the price up a bit, I think a lot of it is other factors:
-Add in board manufacturers telling you to upgrade to PCI-E sooner rather than later
-Relative rarity of AGP cards now, you pay a premium because they're still in demand
-Smaller production runs and increased production costs

And my point about AGP being dead.... as I said there have been only PCI-E native graphics cards for more than 2 years now (not including some crappy S3 and Intel integrated chipsets...), more than long enough for things that qualify as a 'good' PC to be CPU limited by any new card. Unless you have a high end P4 or P-D with an AGP board, or a socket 939 chip with an AGP board, your CPU will probably limit even this card, not to mention the 7800 and 7900 GS boards and the x1950 pro boards available.

And don't even get me started on the x1300 class AGP cards.... the majority of them have more memory than they can use, they don't offer impressive performance, most don't even come in SFF versions. So they sell for more than 2x their worth in many places...

No socket AGP enabled socket 939 board is gonna limit PCI-E in any but the 8800 series cards, not whilst there is at least some availability for dual core athlons and opterons to go into them and in any case there will be millions of those CPU's out there used on the likes of flea bay for people to buy for some time to come, Jesus, I sold a few weeks ago an old Barton xp3000 on flea bay and got £120 for it! there were like 90 people watching it and that price that buys me in the UK a brand new athlon 4200x2.

In many circumstances there is not even a performance hit with AGP over PCI-E as often the additional bandwidth is not being used just the extra price to pay but then again for those without the dosh, its less of a price to pay than an upgrade to AM2 or C2D where they need to replace CPU, mobo and DDR for DDR2, I say if there is customer demand then there should be availability and if manufacturers were not making money out of it, they would not be making them in the first place.

Ohhhhhh and PCI-E versions of the 1300 series cards are equally as crap!

Pinchyi cant agree any more with error_force...i dont get why they are making the AGP cards so much more expensive :shadedshu

it may be a ploy to force people to upgrade, when you think about it in some instances you can upgrade your vga and montherboard for the price of an AGp version of a graphics card

Yeah guys, i see your point...

but for PCIe, people only really need a new motherboard

Not sure about socket 939, cus ive never had one/looked into them, but there are stacks of 775 boards with both DDR and P4 support. There are even Socket 478 PCIe boards (although they are rare and expensive). Now especially with 775...The $100 extra for an AGP card should easily buy a PCIe/DDR/P4 board...

The agp variants are more expensive due to having more hardware on the board! They need a PCI-E to agp bridge chip...and we're not nearing the bandwidth limitation just yet either from what I gather. Having said this, I do like my X850XT PE with PCI-E flavour as I doubt my old 2500 XP-M could have granted me as much processing power as my 3800 X2. Socket 939 and agp is still a viable option from ASRock anyway...

Tatty_OneNo socket AGP enabled socket 939 board is gonna limit PCI-E in any but the 8800 series cards, not whilst there is at least some availability for dual core athlons and opterons to go into them and in any case there will be millions of those CPU's out there used on the likes of flea bay for people to buy for some time to come, Jesus, I sold a few weeks ago an old Barton xp3000 on flea bay and got £120 for it! there were like 90 people watching it and that price that buys me in the UK a brand new athlon 4200x2.

In many circumstances there is not even a performance hit with AGP over PCI-E as often the additional bandwidth is not being used just the extra price to pay but then again for those without the dosh, its less of a price to pay than an upgrade to AM2 or C2D where they need to replace CPU, mobo and DDR for DDR2, I say if there is customer demand then there should be availability and if manufacturers were not making money out of it, they would not be making them in the first place.

Ohhhhhh and PCI-E versions of the 1300 series cards are equally as crap!

I'm not saying AGP yields poorer performance because of bandwidth, that really isn't true, but that isn't a reason to keep cranking AGP cards at increased expense and effort. There is slight bandwidth limitations on some cards in some circumstances, there is slight added latency with the bridge chip, and there is far increased latency when trying to use System RAM to augment VRAM, but that isn't the point. An upgrade to PCI-E for the VAST majority of users is quite cheap. Someone with a socket 939 or 775 chip has an upgrade for less than $70 US in many options, someone who dosen't (socket 478 and A) could get a PCI-E enabled socket 939 or AM2 board for a chip which only costs $60 US more (several semprons meet this criteria) which would be faster than any chip on either of those two platforms.

For those who don't build their own systems, the vast majority of budget computers available now are PCI-E.... so there's a sub $500 option for a COMPLETELY NEW COMPUTER.

And think of that person buying your last CPU, not only could they get a better one and a motherboard capable of using the same RAM, the same graphics card, AND a PCI-E slot for the price they paid you, but they probably don't even know it (the only reason it went for so much is that high end chips for any platform go for a lot, because of stubborn people not wanting to upgrade, AGP is getting there).

Squeezing life out of a system can be nice, but years down the road it is not cost effective or necissairy and you can do quite a bit better with only a couple components new.

Not to mention the balance of the computer for games, a good graphics card can only take an Athlon XP or P4 (478) so far, then the CPU bottlenecks any new games you try to play. Not to mention memory capacity issues with the board and in the case of 478, RDRAM in general.

Also, I know the PCI-E x1300s are crap, but they're cheap crap. Thanks to the bandwidth of PCI-E, they don't fit nearly as much memory on the board and just say it's 512MB with hypermemory. This makes the cards smaller and cheaper (plus no bridge chip) and the increased supply and variety yields better cards and bundles with them. While I entirely agree 512MB of memory is more than an x1300 should ever access.... you pay for every bit of it in an AGP version while the PCI-E version tricks you with advertising and technology (though you don't need it anyway) and gives you the card at a MUCH lower price. Since you will never use 512MB of memory with either card, there will be no performance difference. (yeah yeah, what ifs are fun, generalizations are easy. Plus, most smaller sized cards use faster memory)

I'm not saying AGP is useless, I'm saying it's a bad decision in the vast majority of cases. A lot of people know this, but there is enough who don't/are to stubborn to believe it that cards like this are continued to be released.

Man, that is rediculous and it dosen't even have 256 bit memory, what a RIP OFF.

Lets not forget that not all AGP enabled motherboards have a bridging chip, the Asrock is both PCI-E and AGP native.