GeCube's Radeon HD 2400 Pro AGP8X

In a world centered on increased performance, at least in the computer hardware department, it looks as if old standards for hardware components die and are buried in a rather speedy manner. Or some stay around as a niche market long after the replacement standard which features massive improvements, has arrived. This is the case with the old AGP, the shorthand for accelerated graphics ports, which reached the venerable 4th revision before it was replaced by the better, faster and wider PCI Express standard. While few graphics cards are still in production for the AGP8X standard, the accelerated port seems to survive as a niche market and thanks to the huge number of older graphics cards still in use today, it may get a second life in computer systems where graphics performance comes a distant second or third after cost and other factors.

While the biggest graphics chips manufacturing company declared the AGP8X standard dead and buried, AMD's graphics division begged to differ and started the development work for a new generation of graphics cards that use the new chipsets from the 2xxx line and the old standard. The first card from the low and mid level Radeon HD 2000 series that complies with the AGP8X was just launched by the graphics cards manufacturer GeCube, a company known for its high-end products that are usually overclocked from factory.

The graphics card was launched after several months of intense speculations and rumors flying in all directions. The GeCube card is codenamed GC-RX24PGA2-D3 and it boasts the RV610 graphics chipset and a 256MB of DDR2 video memory, most probably linked to the GPU by a 128 bits wide bus. The GC-RX24PGA2-D3 integrates support for Microsoft's DirectX 10 graphics API as well as the Universal Video Decoder for full video acceleration at high definitions.

The GeCube GC-RX24PGA2-D3 AGP8X based video card is already in stores and it comes with a price tag of around 65 Euro, while the next model featuring 512MB of video memory will probably be a little more expensive.