Looking for AGP vga card for retro lanparty

Hi

at our company we're going to have a retro lanparty where max allowed pc is a PIII 1Ghz with AGP VGA.

Currently i'm looking into buying a "geforce 7800 GS 512 MB" is there something much faster? any idea in what direction to look for the fastest possible VGA on AGP port.

 

6800 GT should do the job. Plenty on eBay, gunna be massively bottlenecked by that CPU anyway

 

Maybe an ATI 3850 or 4650?

 

http://www.hisdigital.com/un/product2-448.shtml

 

i've read a few reviews/benchmarks about the suggested cards, so thank you, 4600 series ati seems more decent than the card i was looking first :grin2:

cpu bottleneck is critical, so for this reason i plan on going with a dual socket 1ghz p3, which i'll try to overclock, maybe a massive watercooling block, to get the most out of it.
found some boards, like: http://www.ebay.de/itm/Motherboard-...257?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2eca4b7471
this specific is not good as i live in europe and i need it by friday

do you think dual slot cpu helps in this case? is it worth the struggle on finding dual/quad slot board with agp?

 

Gainward BLISS 7800 GS+ 24 pixel 8 vertex = 7900gt

awesome GPU and fastest AGP you could get they released 7900gs agp 20 pixel 7 vertex but it was slower than 7800GS+ that was my last AGP graphics card

http://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/b900/gainward-7900-gs-golden-sample.html

 

Sounds like a fun exercise...
* I don't think dual socket is worth it, as "retro" games wont use second CPU anyway. Dual socket mobo's will likely not have any OC options, and will probably mean using low clocked registered DIMMs. I'm sure there is a workstation board out there, but I've not seen a dual P3 board with an APG slot.
* I'm pretty sure HD3850 was the fastest AGP card made. I put one on an old Asus board I found with a Q6600 in a recreational exercise building the fastest AGP system I could. The graphics performance of the AGP HD3850 appeared to be the same with a P4EE@3.2 or a Q6600 - bottlenecked by the AGP bus.
* Basicly, with the games I tested, the 3.2 P4EE with an x1950 was the same as with a HD3850, which was about the same as a Q6600 with the same AGP HD3850. So for me and my games, anything above x1950 seems to be bottlenecked by the AGP 8x...So for an old P3 I doubt you'll see any gains from anything better than a GeForce 4ti or so.
* Old AGP slots may be keyed for high voltage, so the newer AGP cards suggested here MIGHT not work. I can't remember, but AGP key location and voltage change from gen to gen.
* I'm pretty sure no 7800 had 24 pixel shaders either, especially a GS when the GTX was only 20.

 

HD3850 was a fantastic card (I had one or rather, still have it) but if you do get one, I recommend putting a heatsink on the back of the card, more specifically on the railto bridge chip, it can get very hot as the 3850 can easily saturate it's bandwidth (people would often overclock the agp bus in order to allow better utilisation of the card).

WareTernal is quite right, hd3850 is only 4x/8x compatible (and putting it in a 4x board will just cripple the card's performance anyway)

 

The 7950GT was the latest and strongest nvidia card and the HD3850 was the latest from AMD.

AMD's implementation was a bit more stronger and recent. 90nm vs 50nm.

 

Almost all of the GPU's being considered are going to bottleneck hardcore with a P3, I'd just go for whatever you can get cheapest.

 

HD 4670 was last agp card from ATI/AMD

 

system so far

ok, i've got so far:
- Asus CUV4X-D (agp pro 4x, dual socket, max 4Gram) (maybe i'll get another more mainstream board as backup)
- 2x 1000/133MHz PIII SL52R
- Geforce 6200, 256MB AGP
now looking for a decent ram and storage - preferably a ssd to max out the motherboards possibilities

i've chosen the
- VGA because it seems to like many motherboards, 3.3V/1.5V agp.
- mobo because: dual + also supports some overclocking (v=xoMkSd9dS4E)

question: could there be any benefit on choosing any better vga then this GF6200?

 

HD3850 on it's way! i think it will kick ass

funny thing, most likely i'm going to power this baby from a AX1500i :banana:

 

Why an AX1500i?

 

upgrading from my old rm1000 anyway to be able to add an additional titan x to the system, so before putting it into my main rig, i'll give it a testrun on a p3

 

I hope you will use this system for more than one lan party because otherwise it seems expensive.

 

just sold my 7800 gs 256 mb from leadtek , agp , for about 20 euros . , it was a great card ,it pretty ran every game you throw at it.

 

Agh agp

I remember buying that bundle that gave you call of duty 1 with a BFG Tech GeForce FX 5200 and my brother got it too. Boy we were like gaming gods online then LOL :infinity:

 

If your crazy enough to want to truly retrofit. I don't know what system you have but if you had a Dell Precision 530. You could use a PCI-X to PCI-e x16 adapater and use something like the AMD Radeon RX 460 2GB LP for 4k and all that good stuff?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/231995894489?_trksid=p2060353.m1438.l2649&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT

http://www.ebay.com/itm/MSI-Radeon-...525118?hash=item44000b6dbe:g:cjoAAOSwax5YvCFX

By the way I run a HIS AMD Radeon HD 4670 1GB AGP on my Dell Precision 530. Overclocked by bios mod to 800mhz core 940mhz memory. It's the best agp card available. The only thing the HD 3850 has over the HD 4670 is 256-bit memory. Though the arcitectural improvements on the HD 4670 with it's 8 ROP's & 24 TMU's. It has a neat buffer that the HD 3850 doesn't. It lags until all of the game is in video memory and runs very smooth on 1080p for Tomb Raider 2013/ Underworld among BFBC2.

 

Heh, a 1ghz pentium 3 will already bottleneck a Geforce 3, let alone anything faster.