Best AGP card for old P4?

Hi,

My current graphics card (ati 9800 pro 128MB, AGP) has begun to
show a lot of artifacts in 2D and 3D mode.

When I insert another even older 64MB card everything seems fine.

The rest of my system is as follows:

CPU: Pentium 4 , 3 GHz, 800 MHz fsb.
Mobo: no idea?
Ram: 2 GB 800Mhz DDR
PSU: generic 350W with 18A on the +12V
OS: XP sp2

As the rig is otherwise working fine I´m not so keen on upgrading
the whole ting.

My considerations are getting either the Saphire HD 2600 XT 512MB or
the Saphire HD 3850 512MB.

Would I see any improvements in game handling compared to my old
card (the current artifacts aside) - or will my system CPU be the bottleneck?
The same question goes for the two new Saphire cards inbetween -
will I be able to use double the power from the 3850 vs. 2600 XT considering
it´s also almost twice as expensive? Or should I consider other cards?

I read on saphire homepage that the HD 3850 requires 30A on the +12 - that
would mean even more expenses for a PSU upgrade?

Lastly - I have searched the forum and red a lot about the driver problems for this new AGP cards
- should I be worried?

Any advise would be appricheated

Thanks FD

 

Get 2600XT, because 3850 (much better card) needs very good CPU (Amd 5200+ or better, or Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 or lower clocked to speeds of 6600) and with your p4 u will be getting 50%, or less of the card power.That is why 2600XT is better choice for ya.

 

the newer the VGA, the greater power it needs...it's that simple. So if you want to buy a good VGA or maybe an even better VGA, you'll need a proper PSU to keep it run safely.usually for a mid-end card 400W PSU'd be fine.

In your old-PC case, if there's a new card with an AGP interface, I think it'll suit your hardware config, BUT you can't expect a full performance. Why?
First, these new cards are at best on PCi-e 16x, and there's no way an AGP8x slot could beat a PCi-e 16x.
Second, there's a thing called bottle neck. It happens when you install a very good hardware on your system which can run very fast (your VGA), while the other hardwares are old enough and can hardly run at that speed (your proc, memory and MB). So when your VGA would run fast, your processor is in the way, coz it runs slower. And there you go, a fast VGA could only run along with the slow processor.

I used XFX 8600GT Fatal1ty and a P4 631 3GHz processor. I could only get about 70.000 score on Aquamark 3. Even when I overclocked my proc to 4.3GHz, and OCed my VGA a bit, I could hardly reach 91.000. But when I changed to C2D E4300, with its default clock, and my VGA on its default clock also I scored simply 115.000.

about 2600XT or 3850...of course 3850 is way lot better. So if you have the money, I suggest you run to 3850. About driver problems...just be a bit more patient, it'll be out in no time.

 

Thanks for the fast response.

So it´s 1 for the HD 2600 XT and 1 for the HD 3850.

I am still tempted by the HD 3850´s specifications, but if
I would only gain very little (if any at all) over the 2600
than I´ll better use the price difference on a decent PSU.
I am though surprised that all the reviews on these cards
speak of low power consumption - and still they require
external power suply.

One more thing - I would like to upgrade my screen
to a 24". Would this affect the choice between the
2 cards?

FD

 

yes it would if you wish to use a 24 inch monitor then buy the 3850.

 

Back whenI had my athlon xp system, I had one of the AGP versions of the x1650 pro, and that card was the one reason I didn't take the whole system and give it away. lol

good card! Mine was the sapphire with the gddr3

 

I can't speak to specifics about those cards, but I just upgraded my 9800 Pro 128MB to the x1950 Pro 256MB, and WOW! what a difference!

I know my CPU is probably slowing down the performance, but my frame rates are double what they used to be AND I get a lot more eye candy to go with it.

I upgraded my display to a 22" LCD at 1680x1050, and the x1950 Pro drives it well. I play mostly older games, DoD:S BF2 and the like. So it suites me fine. A couple more years and I'll make the leap to PCIe.

You current Power Supply probably wont do, I know it wouldn't have worked with the x1950 Pro. I went with the OCZ SXS500 with two 18A 12v+ rails. It was only $35 after rebates. Don't go with a low quality PS, definatley do your homework on that.

I had some problems getting my x1950Pro to run stable, and I thought that my PS wasn't cutting it becuase ATI said it should have 30A on the 12v+ rail. But the card only draws about 67W at load, and a 18A rail provides 216W, so I'm pretty sure it has enough juice. The thing that I think finally got it to run stabel was increasing my AGP slot voltage from 1.5 to 1.7.

Good luck.

 

Well if I remember correctly then the performance of the 1950 pro is closer to the 3850 than the 2600 XT. Since the new 3850 is cheaper than the 1950 (at least in the shop I found the lowest price on the 3850) I am really close to buying that. I´ll choose the Saphire model because of place limitations (single slot) and a Corsair 450W PSU that has 33A on the +12V.

How did you increase the voltage on the AGP slot?

FD

 

I have a 9800 it seems to run pretty good on most games, except for the most recent ones which require hardcore graphics.

 

Agp

Hey dude,... Dnt think of buying anything.... I'm in the same 'orphan" like you looking for a good Nvidia or ATI AGP Card...

Yes, let me remind you that DX10 came and outdated within 7 month...then came DX10.1...............

U might be shocked if i say in 2009/10 :

Windows Vienna
DirectX11
* Shader Model 5.0
* 48-bit floating point texture filtering
* Indexed cube map arrays
* Independent blend modes per render target
* Pixel coverage sample masking
* Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
* Gather5 texture fetching
Intel 8 Core


All these COSTS...... But these tooooo will get ditched after one or two year.... :

-----------------------


ATI AGP 3850HD 512MB:



ATI RADEON™ HD 3850 AGP


* 666 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
* AGP 4X/8X bus interface
* 256-bit GDDR3 memory interface
* Ring Bus Memory Controller
o Fully distributed design with 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
* Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
o Shader Model 4.1
o 32-bit floating point texture filtering
o Indexed cube map arrays
o Independent blend modes per render target
o Pixel coverage sample masking
o Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
o Gather4 texture fetching
* Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
o 320 stream processing units
+ Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
+ Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
+ Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
o 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
o Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
o Shader instruction and constant caches
o Up to 80 texture fetches per clock cycle
o Up to 128 textures per pixel
o Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
o DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
o High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
o Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
o Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
o Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
o Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
o Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
o 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
o Physics processing support
* Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
o High performance vertex cache
o Programmable tessellation unit
o Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
o Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
* Anti-aliasing features
o Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
o Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
o Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
o Temporal anti-aliasing
o Gamma correct
o Super AA (ATI CrossFire™ configurations only)
o All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
* Texture filtering features
o 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
o 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
o Bicubic filtering
o sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
o Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
o Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
o Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
* OpenGL 2.0 support
* ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform
o Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats
+ High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats
o Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and DivX video decode acceleration
+ Motion compensation and IDCT
o ATI Avivo Video Post Processor
+ Color space conversion
+ Chroma subsampling format conversion
+ Horizontal and vertical scaling
+ Gamma correction
+ Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
+ De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
+ Detail enhancement
+ Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
+ Bad edit correction
o Two independent display controllers
+ Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
+ Full 30-bit display processing
+ Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
+ Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
+ High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
+ Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
+ Fast, glitch-free mode switching
+ Hardware cursor
o Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
+ Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)
+ Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content
o Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
+ Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x1536
o Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
+ Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
+ Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
+ Underscan and overscan compensation
o MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
o Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
o VGA mode support on all display outputs
* ATI PowerPlay™
o Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
o Performance-on-Demand
o Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
o Clock and memory speed throttling
o Voltage switching
o Dynamic clock gating
o Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required

1. Some custom resolutions require user configuration
2. HDCP support for playback of protected content requires connection to a HDCP capable display

System Requirement:

* AGP based PC is required with one 4X/8X AGP slot available on the motherboard.
* 1GB or greater system memory for better performance.
* 450Watt or greater power supply with 30Amps on 12 volt with 2x4 power connector recommanded.
* Certified power supplies are recommended. Refer to http://ati.amd.com/certifiedPSU for a list of Certified products
* Installation software requires CD-ROM drive.
* DVD playback requires DVD driver
* Blu-ray/HD DVD playback requires Blu-ray/HD-DVD drive and playback software.




ATI RADEON™ HD 2600XT 512MB



* 390 million transistors on 65nm fabrication process
* 128-bit DDR2/GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface
* Ring Bus Memory Controller

o Fully distributed design with 256-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
* Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
o 120 stream processing units
+ Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
+ Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
+ Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
o 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
o Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
o Shader instruction and constant caches
o Up to 40 texture fetches per clock cycle
o Up to 128 textures per pixel
o Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
o DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
o High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
o Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
o Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
o Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
o Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
o Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
o 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
o Physics processing support
* Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 10.0
o Shader Model 4.0
o Geometry Shaders
o Stream Output
o Integer and Bitwise Operations
o Alpha to Coverage
o Constant Buffers
o State Objects
o Texture Arrays
* Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
o High performance vertex cache
o Programmable tessellation unit
o Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
o Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
* Anti-aliasing features
o Multi-sample anti-aliasing (up to 8 samples per pixel)
o Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
o Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
o Temporal anti-aliasing
o Gamma correct
o All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
* Texture filtering features
o 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
o 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
o Bicubic filtering
o sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
o Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
o Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
o Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
* ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform
o Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats
+ High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats
o Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX video decode acceleration
+ Motion compensation and iDCT (inverse discrete cosine transform)
o Avivo Video Post Processor
+ Color space conversion
+ Chroma subsampling format conversion
+ Horizontal and vertical scaling
+ Gamma correction
o High Quality Video Post Processing
+ Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
+ De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
+ Detail enhancement
+ Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
+ Bad edit correction
o Two independent display controllers
+ Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
+ Full 30-bit display processing
+ Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
+ Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
+ High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
+ Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
+ Fast, glitch-free mode switching
+ Hardware cursor
o Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
+ Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)1
+ Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content2
o Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
+ Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15361
o Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
+ Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
+ Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
+ Underscan and overscan compensation
o MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
o Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
o VGA mode support on all display outputs
* AGP 4X/8X bus interface
* OpenGL 2.0 support

1 Some custom resolutions require user configuration
2 HDCP support for playback of protected content requires connection to a HDCP capable display

-------------------------------
Now up to you AGPians...............

Cheers|BABA|

 

computer...last year a shader 4.0 supported vcards are a bit rare. Even DX 10 games haven't even out yet. But now, look at crysis..it's a game which required a 2-more-years-graphic card to be run at its very best setting smoothly. And dude...that's technology...

but the point of all that...of course VGA...any newest games would require the most powerful VGA on earth at that time to run. But those very high-end VGAs would only be a waste of money when the processor can't handle its speed.

So basically...a good VGA definitely needs a good processor. But a good processor can handle any VGA...it's your choice.

 

I went the new Radeon X1950 pro AGP with a P4 3.2 ghz cpu last year. (I have since given my family computer those parts) This year I went with a new ASRock MB and a Radeon X2900 pro pci-e, and core2 duo cpu, and the the price was better than staying with agp. I would say, go with pci-e and not waste time and money on agp any longer.

:banana:

 

I would love to wait, but unfurtunately my 9800pro is artifacting like crazy.
Actually I can´t use the PC at all right now and have to post from a laptop or work.
But taking your viewpoint into account maybe it´s best to take the cheapest card
- manage for a year or so (or until 2009/10) and than ditch the whole system.

With all the rumours about lacking driver support for the AGP´s from ATI,
should I opt for another card like the Nvidia 7600GT series? It´s a bit older,
but I wouldn´t miss dx10 as I won´t upgrade to Vista anyway.

FD

 

From my experiances of looking and searching, it appears that the x1950 still reigns king of the agp world, with the 7900 and 7800 coming in behind.

Some benchmark test I have seen have put 7600gts way over 1650s and even 2600 pros.

If you just want something that is between 70-90 (US), then I suggest you go to www.newegg.com and look at the HIS, Sapphier, and Power Color 1650s-2600s. *Note a lot of forums, and even reviews on the site complain of DOA cards, high temps, and horrible drivers (with power color being the worse.)

You can also search google products, amazon, or even Ebay for 7800s and 7600gts (7900s if you are lucky.)

*EVGA has a 20 dollar rebate on 7600gts which ends tomorrow. which brings their 7600gt 512 ddr2 down to around 100 even.)

My suggestion, don't break the bank on a agp card, because pretty soon you will be forced to upgrade to PCI-E.

But don't just go around trying to get the cheapest deal either. Because you will just wind up wasting time and money.

 

This has been a great card for me, BUT you will need a better PSU than what you have, you need to have like 30 amps on the 12v rail, but it will make a huge difference from what you have now...our setups are not too far from each others and I can run any game out there with mostly all options maxed out at 1024x768 (just where I like to have it)... not the speadiest system by far, but it works fine for me now........



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...C-pr1c3grabb3r-_-Video+Cards-_-HIS-_-14161071

 

The BIOS on my mother board gives me the option to adjust it from 1.5 to 1.8

Also, I'm using the AGP hotfix drivers. I don't remember the version number, and I dont' think they are on the AMD webstie, but you can search this forum and probably find a link to it.

Some of the other posts mention driver and temp problems with the x1950. I'm not sure which fix I tried that finally go my card working, but I don't think it was a temp problem for me. Down load the Everest Ultimate hardware monitor software, it's a free 30 day trial, and it will let you monitor the VRM temperature (Voltage Regulator Module).

I think one of the problems I was having was that I was trying to run 3 sticks of RAM in my mobo, which is fine, except the bus defaults to 333MHz with three sticks. I can force it to 400MHz, but that caused instability.

Anyway, I'm running the 3 sticks at 333. While not optimal, it's faster than the 2x512 at 400, and it's stable.

 

Hi Wurum,

thanks for the reply.

Reading the Saphire forums and the current problems with the HD 2600/3850 AGP cards I am now looking at the older X1950 pro. It seems to also have had some problems, but most of them are fixable - like in your last thread with
the 3 ram blocks

FD

 

I've learned a ton about this card in the last two weeks, so if you have any questions, I'll try to help.

Here's a nice thread regarding power consuption

And here's the link to that hot fix driver I mentioned previously. These are the drivers I'm running now.

And here's a link to a list of possilbe fixes if your card is misbehaving. It's the one that gave me the idea to increase the agp slot voltage.

Going back on the power supply issue for a second, if you go with the x1950, it will likely have a 6 pin PCI-e type power socket. I know you talked about getting a new power supply already, so this probably wont be an issue. But if you do try to power it with your current PS, it probably doesn't have the right plug and will need an adapter.

 

I'd say a 3850, just be aware that your CPU will bottleneck the card badly..

 

Thanks to everybody for the help!

I have now purchased a Saphire x1950 pro 512MB card.
It is now installed and running - no problems yet.
Have only run 3DMark05 on it and scored 6200 points
compared to 2030 with a 6600 TD 128MB card.
On the other hand somehow the CPU score decreased
from 3750 to 3400 with the new card. FPS was about
3-4 under the test so I guess the outcome can warry
a bit from time to time.
I also dared not to buy a new PSU and try it on the old
generic 350W suply with 18A on the +12V! - so far it works
fine, and I actually have installed an ekstra cooler fan.
Hope it will continue this way (fingers crossed).

FD