It is very sad to tell, but there are a lot of personal computers without AGP slot. These are old Celeron and i810 based PCs as well as even the brand new Socket 478 Pentium 4 and Celeron processors on i845GL based platforms. Although the performance of integrated graphics core is sufficient for office applications, it is definitely not enough to play 3D-games. As we know all the new graphics cards are intended for AGP bus, thus, it is pretty hard to find a good solution for those, who do not have an AGP slot in their systems.

I have noticed at Akiba PC Watch web-site that certain Japanese stores have started to sell ATI RADEON 7500 graphics cards with PCI interface. The cards are “Built by ATI” and are full-speed RADEON 7500 clocked at 270/460MHz for core and memory and equipped with D-Sub, DVI-I and TV-Out connectors.

In Japan such graphics cards cost about $120, while according to PriceWatch, one can find them for $79 in the USA. Since the RADEON 7500 with DDR SDRAM memory is definitely faster and better compared to the GeForce4 MX420 with SDR memory, RADEON 7500 can be considered as the fastest consumer-oriented PCI graphics card for below $100.

Correction: The fastest consumer-oriented PCI graphics card is probably Hercules 3D-Prophet RADEON 9000 PCI or, maybe, Voodoo 5 5500 PCI.