3850 AGP reviewed-yes, AGP

[Babrbarossa]

The Inquirer had reviewed one of the new AGP versions of the HD 3850 by PowerColor. Apparently, and incredibly, a few other manufacturers will be following with the same. Not sure why someone would spend 200 bucks on an AGP card rather than upgrade their system, but L'Inq managed to get over 4600 on 3DMark06 with their Pentium 4 System. I suppose many will want this card to build a home theatre system from their old computer.

WITH PCI EXPRESS having become the standard for graphics cards over the past years – we could hardly believe our ears when ATI partners started announcing they were doing their own AGP thing with the HD 3850. We immediately bummed a card and as sure as eggs the delivery guy was knocking at our door a couple of weeks later – the delay justified by “driver development”.
But “an AGP card?” you ask. We’ve got good reason to: late last year we retired an aging Pentium 4 machine, long past its glory days (if ever it had one, it was a Pentium 4 after all...) and now, low and behold, PowerColor springs this surprise on the world, saving AGP graphics from extinction with the very surprising HD 3850 PCS AGP 512MB.



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[sam101p5]

Good find!

[b1lk1]

Pop this card into a decent S939 AGP based PC and you will have a beast! Considering were are STILL not using all the bandwidth of the PCI-E 16X slot, AGP was killed off much too soon. Nice to see cards still coming in AGP flavor.

[sswilson]

It's certainly a good business move for ATI/AMD.......

Something fairly decent to drop into an older rig that might hold off an upgrade until AMD can release a decent proc.

[NuxTux]

How much of a boost will I see with my computer running an old radeon 7200 to this card. System specs are.

CPU: P4 478 1.6Ghz
RAM: 768MB 133Mhz
AGP: Slot 4x

If I have this setup as a LAN will my friends be able to play games on it that where released Q1 2006?

[sswilson]

you would probably see quite a boost, but the card would without a doubt be bottlenecked not only by the X4 slot (depending on the slot it might not be compatible) and the processor/memory.

AGP versions of recent cards generally cost more than their PCIe brethrens, so you'd be better served to spend the $200 this card would cost you on a budget mobo/proc/mem combo.

I suspect even a mATX board with fairly current on-board video would outperform your current rig.

[sswilson]

AMD Sempron 3400+ Processor Socket AM2 F2 Manila 1.8GHZ 1600FSB 256KB L2 Cache 62W 90NM Retail Box - DirectCanada

ECS GEFORCE6100SM-M2 V1.0A mATX AM2 GF6100 NF405 DDR2 PCI-E16 2PCI SATA2 Video Sound LAN Motherboard - DirectCanada

OCZ Gold XTC PC2-6400 2GB 2X1GB DDR2-800 CL5-5-5-12 240PIN DIMM Dual Channel Memory Kit - DirectCanada

These three would be sub-$200 (after taxes & delivery), but I wouldn't expect to be playing too many FPS games with them.

[NuxTux]

Would they lets say be able to run Q4 or Quake Wars, Battlefield 2xxx (forgot what its called) AOE 3 and other not to high tech RTSs

[Jmac]

Uh ... 4600 sucks ...

My bro's 3850 PCI-E does like 8700+ in 3DMark06 with the latest drivers (see Project Oscar The Grouch in the Build Log section, that score is most likely CPU-limited as well) ...

AMD 4800+, 2.5 GB of RAM, HD 3850 256 MB, Vista Home Basic ... <$500 in December ...