HD38XX for AGP?

from what little i could find on it, its supposed to be out late Jan. and be priced some where around 200.00.

we shall see how true that is.
 
A-L-E-X said:
Powercolor came out with the 3850 AGP. DX10.1 card! Too bad its not the 3870.

http://www.powercolor.com/Global/pro...ProductID=1730

Availability in January, pending driver release.

And maybe more powerful agp cards from ati coming out in the future?
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Unlikely. The 3850 will either max out AGP's bandwidth or come close to it. Anything faster than that and you're going to see some seriously diminishing returns. I wouldn't be surprised if we see more AGP cards down the road, but they won't be in the performance segment, they'll be mid-ranged, then low-end, then the format will finally "die", probably more than a decade after most HardOCP denizens held its official funeral :)
 
I wouldn't mind putting one in either of my Dual Xeon boxes (PC-DL and PCH-DL). If the price is right I probably will.
 
Actually, there is nothing wrong with AGP when you're using a single card. The move to PCI-e was done mainly to allow for SLI/Crossfire. (Even then, Crossfire came after SLI :cool:)
 
In b4 the lock :D I think there is still a viable market for mainstream/budget cards on AGP. Alot of people play at 1024x768 and 1280x1024 according to Steam's hardware summaries (at least the last time I played HL2).
 
I'm a perfect example of how this card could be worth it for some people. If I get any new upgrade, I'll have to get another mobo, ram, and cpu. I could go ASRock, but why bother..only PCI-e x4, with very limited OC ability.

This could keep my aging rig alive for another year or so. DX10 would be really nice, too.
 
ClearM4 said:
If you have an agp Athlon 64 3500+, Athlon X2, Intel P4 3.2 Ghz or better system the HD3850 will be an great upgrade and will give your aging PC new life.

Ignore PC elitists, and the agp naysayers.

And the idea of replacing a motherboard without doing a clean install makes me cry. Seriously, I've had the pleasure of fixing this issue on a few occasion from people that thought they were so smart. The driver/file/program/registry issues that occur doing this can't be accounted for. Different motherboard chipsets rarely play nice together. Then customers complain, "why is my new PC so slow," or "why is my new PC full of errors."
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I totally agree with you here. Anything less than the processors you have mentioned will be a waste of time. And I also agree with fhpchris to a certain extent, he just needs to post like an adult and not a child and maybe people will take him more seriously.I just made the switch from AGP to PCI while keeping all my components but videocard.

Alittle bit of the history on it.

Use to run a Nforce2 with a Barton at 2.4ghz and X800XTPE. Videocard was cpu limited.
Upgraded to a Nforce3 a64 3200+ and that like helped a ton. Later went to a single Core Opteron 146 overclocked and it helped even more. I was running a 21` crt at the time so mainly gamed at 1280x1024. Then decided to install a Dual core Opteron 170 and upgraded my monitor to a 22` Samsung LCD. Now another problem noticed at the native res of the LCD, I was no longer getting the playable frame rate I needed with some of the newer games.

Sold the x800xtpe great card and picked up X1950Pro 512MB AGP. This now made all the games I was having issues with playable. However as i've been watching the market I was starting to get tired of limited options for AGP cards and their higher prices.

So this decemeber I said Fuk it, picked up a Asus A8N32 -SLI Deluxe and a HD3870 then reused the rest of my components. .

Was it all worth it yes! COD4,Bioshock Crysis all playable on PCI E card at the settings I use, the X1950pro was struggling alittle. Now this videocard I can take to my next rig which will be a quadcore one at some point, and no longer waiting and hoping for faster AGP cards to come out.

Putting a 3850AGP card in anything slower than a P4 at 3.2 will not get you the improvement you are looking for. However, your mileage may vary and the above was just my story the original build for my rig was 2005 so it has been a work in progress keeping it usable for current games while not breaking the bank.

O forgot to mention the upgrade cost. $50 for the used PCI E board and $259 for the Asus HD3870.

And I think this was smarter move than say upgrading my x1950 to a HD3850AGP.
 
fhpchris said:
If you would listen, your rig is so CPU limited that putting in a larger GFX card will hardly even help at all.

If you are on AGP, upgrade to PCIE cheaply. If you have to use a LGA775 Cedar mill and a PCI-E X850 than thats what you have to do man...
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My previous rig was a Socket A AMD 2500+ Xp and before I built a PCI-E system, I thought there was a CPU bottleneck as well. The video card was a ATI x850 Pro (16 pixel shaders unlocked). Upgrading an agp card depends on more factors, especially if you have a socket A.
 
Moving to PCI-E can often make sense. I don't think you'll find too many AGP users who claim that moving to PCI-E never makes sense. But if you have, for instance, a relatively fast S754 processor and 1 GB or more of DDR1 RAM, you'd have to upgrade the whole system to move to PCI-E, and an AGP 3850 would make a lot of sense, especially if all you really want is to play the latest games at modest settings and resolutions for the next couple of years.
 
I don't understand why some people would suggest AGP users to upgrade to PCI-E now, PCI-E is dead, PCI-E 2.0 is here already
 
You should have left the post without the smiley and the brackets. I would have loved to see some of the responses.

Some people are really blind to sarcasm.
 
alg7_munif said:
I don't understand why some people would suggest AGP users to upgrade to PCI-E now, PCI-E is dead, PCI-E 2.0 is here already
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PCI-E is not dead! They are just updating the standard, just like there was AGP 2x AGP 4x and AGP 8x. PCI-E 2.0 cards are backwards compatible with the previous version.
 
arthur_tuxedo said:
Unlikely. The 3850 will either max out AGP's bandwidth or come close to it. Anything faster than that and you're going to see some seriously diminishing returns. I wouldn't be surprised if we see more AGP cards down the road, but they won't be in the performance segment, they'll be mid-ranged, then low-end, then the format will finally "die", probably more than a decade after most HardOCP denizens held its official funeral :)
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It would be nice for something to use all the AGP slots bandwidth, nothing has thus far....
 
arthur_tuxedo said:
Unlikely. The 3850 will either max out AGP's bandwidth or come close to it. Anything faster than that and you're going to see some seriously diminishing returns. I wouldn't be surprised if we see more AGP cards down the road, but they won't be in the performance segment, they'll be mid-ranged, then low-end, then the format will finally "die", probably more than a decade after most HardOCP denizens held its official funeral :)
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I saw in a benchmark that someone simulated the AGP (capping the PCI-E to 4x) and only the 8800GTX showed slighly decrease in performance while the other cards stayed the same, after all, the operations that most saturated the bandwidth are the texture reads and fetches, and none of the currently ATi hardware have such great deal of texture power like the GeForce 8 do because ATi hardware relies more on shader performance. So the only bottleneck that the Radeon HD 3850 may face is a CPU bottleneck.
 
Ejay said:
Just a reminder with regard to what the 1950 Pro AGP accomplished:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/02/01/agp-platform-analysis/page10.html

According to this review, the 1950 Pro AGP made an appreciable difference even on an Athlon 2500, even more on a 3400 (single cores).

I would conjecture that for some, the 3850 variant would be a viable alternative, provided the addition of the Realto chip doesn't increase the cost more than $20-$30.

Just a thought...
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Interesting.....it does show that you could update a 2500 with a new card and it would give some gain. Though I would be curious of any better increase in performance if you upgrade the cpu to the 3200 and update the card.
 
evolucion8 said:
I saw in a benchmark that someone simulated the AGP (capping the PCI-E to 4x) and only the 8800GTX showed slighly decrease in performance while the other cards stayed the same, after all, the operations that most saturated the bandwidth are the texture reads and fetches, and none of the currently ATi hardware have such great deal of texture power like the GeForce 8 do because ATi hardware relies more on shader performance. So the only bottleneck that the Radeon HD 3850 may face is a CPU bottleneck.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but that test didn't include the 8800 GTS, which probably also would have been lightly bottlenecked. It only tested the 8800 GTX, X1950 XTX, and a few lesser cards. Anyway, it's possible you could make an AGP 3870 and it would retain most or all of its performance advantage over 3850, but it's possible that it wouldn't. Someone would need to do another PCI-E 4x test to confirm.
 
skadebo said:
Hello,

PCI Express Implementation Encoded Data Rate Unencoded Data Rate
x1 5 Gbps 4 Gbps (500 MB/sec)
x4 20 Gbps 16 Gbps (2 GB/sec)
x8 40 Gbps 32 Gbps (4 GB/sec)
x16 80 Gbps 64 Gbps (8 GB/sec)

AGP8X 2.1 GB/sec = peak 32-bit transfer rate

source: http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/vectors/en/2004_pciexpress?c=us&l=en&s=corp
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Good reference to the theoetical, but then there is also the practical, eg...

http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/Sapphire X1950Pro AGP/oblivion.php

At what point, holding cpu and RAM as constants, will the PCIe equivalent show clear dominance in games? We may find out with the 3850.
 
Yeah, it's unfortunate that we haven't had reviews that pit high end cards against each other because high end was not available in AGP. Also, that x1950 comparison is flawed because the cards are operating at different frequencies and have different framebuffers. The PCI-e card is 256mb vs 512mb but has a higher core clock by 20mHz.
 
Some Pics and Specs of the HD 3850 512MB AGP Cards ....

Powercolor HD3850 512MB: http://www.powercolor.com/Global/products_features.asp?ProductID=1730

3850pchx3.jpg


Video Memory: 512MB GDDR3
Engine Clock: 668MHz
Memory Clock: 828MHz x 2
Memory Interface: 256bit
DirectX Support: 10.1
Bus Standard: AGP x8


Sapphire HD3850 512MB / From Spec Doc:

SAPPHIRE SUPPORTS AGP with HD 3850

Now latest graphics architecture fits legacy systems

SAPPHIRE Technology, industry leader in graphics solutions, has just announced support for legacy PC systems using the AGP graphics bus with a new product in its HD 3000 series which brings the latest graphics architectures and features to this industry standard platform.

The SAPPHIRE HD 3850 AGP is available with 512MB of GDDR3 memory, running at 846MHz (1.7GHz effective) and has a core clock speed of 700MHz. It is a standard ATX format card, compatible with the industry standard AGP interface and with its slim fan assisted cooler the card occupies only a single expansion slot in the PC.

The SAPPHIRE HD 3850 AGP shares the 320 stream processors and 512-bit internal ring bus memory controller of the latest PCI-Express models together with multiple rendering units and a programmable tessellation unit. This new product’s unified shader architecture with support for Shader Model 4.0 and the forthcoming DirectX 10.1 combine to deliver the most outstanding graphics performance ever available to AGP users.

Now manufactured in a new 55nm process technology, the GPU in the HD 3000 series delivers high performance with lower power consumption than previous generations. A new feature known as ATI PowerPlay actively reduces power consumption depending on loading. On the AGP model, additional power is required via the 8-pin PCI-Express connector fitted, which can be provided from a standard power supply with an adapter cable (supplied).

The SAPPHIRE HD 3850 AGP incorporates the latest ATI Avivo™ HD Technology for enhanced Video display and features a built in UVD (Unified Video decoder) for the hardware accelerated decoding of Blu-ray™ and HD DVD content for both VC-1 and H.264 codecs, considerably reducing CPU loading. Two independent display output controllers provide support for two dual link DVI displays as well as TV-out and HD TV options. HDCP is supported.

SAPPHIRE HD 3000 series graphics cards are Microsoft Windows Vista™ Premium certified and supported by the ATI Catalyst® suite of software, ensuring customers have ongoing access to software updates for performance, stability and added features.

3850agpvq6.jpg
 
Has anyone found an agp 3850 for sale anywhere on the planet? I keep seeing announcements for them, i even e-mailed sapphire and never got a reply back.
 
i just emailed Gecube, i asked for an approximate date the cards are to hit the retailers, core and memory clocks, and the msrp.

well see if anything comes out of this.

something i just noticed. the press release is no longer up on the main page, and i cant find it in the archives. found it by going through an old link. the date has changed on the press release from 1/11/08 to 1/31/08.

http://www.gecube.com/press-release-detail.php?id=69914
 
Wow, it is almost 4 years since the i915 chipset came out and it's coming up on 3.5 years that PCI-E has been available for AMD CPUs. And here I am still stuck on VL-Bus. I just can't let go.
 
its probably because the drivers were piss poor and didnt work for more then half the people that got their hands on the cards.
 
They might as well bring out the 3870 for agp as well.

I have a dual agp/pcie mobo and I guess you could say the bus speeds are equivalent...I have agp 8x and pcie 4x.

Im scoring over 9000 with an 8800gts 640mb card on the pcie port and some others are getting 9500-9800 on their 3870 pcie 4x cards in 3DMark06
 
this is from the same guy.

3dmark06b.png


he broke 10k with the auto overclock setting. 709/949 and 48*C under load.
 
I would realy like to upgrade my AGP slot one last time with this card. to bad Nvidia isn't makeing one last AGP card for the 8xxx version. those 3dmark scores are amazing. will be a great update from my 6800gt. :)
 
koolhands said:
I would realy like to upgrade my AGP slot one last time with this card. to bad Nvidia isn't makeing one last AGP card for the 8xxx version. those 3dmark scores are amazing. will be a great update from my 6800gt. :)
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You never know. It took them (XFX) quite a while to respond with the 7950GT after the X1950 Pro's were released last year.
 
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