When we moved from AGP to PCIe it was to secure the bandwidth for future graphics cards. Even if we back then had a hard time reaching the capacity of AGP 8x they could motivate it by saying future cards will need it. Even if one could still wonder if today’s graphics cards really need the enormous bandwidth of PCIe x16 there are narrower ports to use. At TweakTown they’ve tested a 7300GT using the much narrower PCIe x1 interface (500MB/s vs. 8000MB/s). It turns out that PCIe x16 is motivated even with slow cards like 7300GT. There are other interesting uses for these PCIe x1 cards though.
