Last AGP hurrah!

Right, I've decided that I can scrape up just enough money to have one last hurrah on my aging Athlon XP system. Before anyone asks: yes, I'm aware there's a reasonable chance that my modestly overclocked CPU is going to bottleneck some games, but frankly I don't intend to play many new games on this machine (I have Kali for that :) ) - it'll predominantly be used for light gaming and in-house LANing, and for me to kill time on if the other half nicks Kali!

So, I appear to have 2 options:

Sapphire 3850 512MB - £69.58 - last generation, 256bit memory bus, draws a *lot* of power (apparently, it comes with it's own Y-adapter to draw power from 2 molex connectors).

Powercolor 4670 1GB - £72.21 - current (just!) generation, 128bit memory bus, lower power requirements (single molex connector on PCB).

Both cards are 320 stream processor, the 4670 clocks slightly higher so has more arithmetical grunt, but obviously will suffer from a lack of bandwidth. From what I can tell performance difference between the two cards is likely to be marginal. It would also appear that both cards have some driver issues due to the need for AGP hotfixes to the catalyst drivers, but a bit of research suggests that the problem isn't worse for either card.

Given how even the cards seem to be (and that this will definitely be the last upgrade for this machine!), anyone got any advice for me on choosing between them?

Given that your system is old, what is your PSU like?

Is the power draw from the 3850 going to be an issue, impacting general system stability?

I would expect this to be less of a problems with the 4670.

I think I would go for the 4670. They are likely to be similar in performance but the 4670 is likely to be kinder to your aging system!

HD 3850 is the better card, once you use higher resolutions.

The price would make me wince though as PCI-E HD4850s are about that much. If you don't want to run anything recent I'd look at getting an older directX 9.0c card 2nd hand. Maybe something like the Geforce 6600GT, 6800 (vanilla, GT or Ultra) or 7600 (vanilla, GS or GT). If you dont' need shader 3.0 (for titles like Bioshock) you could go older. ATI 9500 Pro. 9700 (vanilla or pro), 9600XT, 9800 (pro or XT) spring to mind.

Some recent articles on AGP gaming with benchmarks:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/agp-ra...iew-31662.html

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/radeon...iew-31659.html

The PSU is rated for 550W, and I think has a single 12v rail (but I'd need to check). It's not exactly a top brand (it's a Q-Tec!), but has been pretty reliable for the last 3 years, including running 24/7 for a couple of month.

The system it's going in is in "my system" - I'm going to be adding another 1GB of RAM at the same time...

Uriel: thanks for those links - very informative :) It looks like with brand new games I'd see a significant processor bottleneck (considering I don't have anywhere near the power of an X2 3800+!) - although tbh I'm unlikely to be playing anything quite that new or framerate sensitive (I tend more towards RPGs than FPS).

Based on that I'd be better off saving a tenner and going for the 4650 instead, since I'm unlikely to get the full benefit of a 3850 or 4670 in comparison. That makes me wonder whether dialling right back to a 3650 might be a better bet, saving even more cash...

As an aside, I actually have a radeon 9800 around (the previous upgrade to this PC), but based on the benchies I'm going to see improvements from that even with a 4650 - and, of course, I'm bound to come across some game I want at some point that has SM3 as a minimum requirement...

As to the price, I know it's expensive in comparison to PCIe graphics, but it's a lot cheaper than a whole new computer, and a signficant saving from about 6 months ago when the 3850 was all of £100....

Have you tried looking for a 2nd hand 3850?

The 3850 and 4670 are the top agp cards, there will be nothing better.
however a 2nd hand top end dx9 card will probably be best
x1900XT or 7950GT

However cpu and memory speed are going to be problematic, depending on game.
And the games you intend to play will be the big factor,
Dig out a copy of Half life and opposing forces, force all the graphic setting high at a driver level and enjoy ;)
Some of these old games still look great when you force all the setting. (I've been playing dungeon keeper2 recently with FSAA x16 and AF x16 and it looks pritty good.)

I had a 3850 in my 939 system before getting my current system, brilliant card, ran CSS at 1680x1050 at medium settings without a single hitch.

Thanks for all the input guys but a set of mad purchases in the For Sale forum have made this all a bit moot - I'm getting a second low-end(ish) machine so won't be bothering to upgrade after all...