That is one beast of an AGP bus video card! WOW! It over-powers my X1950 Pro AGP by a longshot

Please let AGP die quietly now...

It's not that the card will be limited by the AGP bus, but rather the CPUs that AGP mobos still use. Hope I'm making sense here.

Point is, if you're still using an AGP motherboard, it's likely that the CPU you're still using on it will vastly limit this cards potential.

Well, honestly there are some agp boards that are running the Pentium D (preslor) cores, so I would doubt that the HD3850 agp card will be bottlenecked by that. One the other hand if you are running a standard Pentium 4, you will be bottlenecked by your processor

best card for owners with Intel Core 2 Duo and agp system's

sorry for my english

the Funny thing is a AGP card actually cost more than a PCIe card

Thats probably because of the presumably low production run for the AGP version wyz135.

Cheers

where can i buy one????

Besides from the fact AGP isn't all that tasty and so on, can we claim this if the 'fastest' AGP Card? and if so put it into 'Superlatives' Even if it is severely bottlenecked by people with AGP systems looking to upgrade.

sorry but half of you do not know what your talking about , agp based mobo's running am2 or intel core2 can still be bought . the 3850 agp will be around the performance of the 8800gts 320

nforce3 250/x2 3800/7800gs 3d mark 06-3715 why not one more upgrade

Please show me a agp based mobo that supports the L775 chipset that doesnt also have a pic-e slot. If you can, they are "very" few and far between. I know exactly what iam talking about.

There are .. but you are right... they are rare .

Trickling into the market now that the necessary driver has become available. $211 at ewiz.

$190.74 via froogle but now OOS.

about time they released a new AGP videocard for those of us who haven't upgrade our WHOLE computer to PCI-e. bang for the buck wise.... $215 for this card versus spending around $1000.oo or more to upgrade to a PCI-e based computer (as in fresh built with ALL new parts for a PCI-e pc) compared to merely buying 1 new agp card and gaining alittle more time until a total upgrade is in ones budget or feasible if one had bought a computer not to long ago that was agp. a worth while upgrade for AGP videocard users at this time. capable of playing all of todays latest games at good respectable quality and preformance.

At what to the point the video card will bottleneck. Will my system optimize the card performance? I have a P4 3.2HT 2GB mem?

To Isaac28

No,your processor is to weak for this card,but it might help in some games.

Hun88, Isaac28's processor " P4 3.2HT 2GB mem " is not to weak for this card. please do your research next time to prevent misunderstandings and/or errors. it will not be as fast as a PCI-e videocard but it will be a very big improvement over his old card and it will help him alot.

I just got this card...And I have to say for me it was a very good upgrade ..My old CARD was 9800xt..And CRYSIS Would only play on low settings @1024x768..Now it plays With everything on high settings @1024x768 And I'm getting better frame rates too..on a P4 3.0 ,2GB RAM.NO bottleneck.

I have a P4 3.4Ghz and 2GB of ram, and it can work up 4.1Ghz, so will that be enough to run games smoothly like Need For Speed ProStreet.

I have had both the Pentium 4 Northwood core and the Presscott core. Presscott core is by far superior and less of a bottleneck as it has double the onboard cache and supports SSE3 where as the Northwood doesn't.

I used to have a 3.4GHz Norhtwood P4 overclocked to 4.1GHz and it ran slower than the Presscott 3GHz overclocked to 3.3GHz.

Its not all about speed, its about the cache and steps that prevent you from bottlenecking.

Price check: $204 shipped @ ewiz via froogle vs $221 newegg.

Question: which models, if any, include an audio controller? Also do the DVI-HDMI adapters for HDMI audio differ for the 3000 series versus the 2000?

AGP is not dead. But this is probably the very last upgrade you will make. CPU has never really been bottleneck for most games the last 5 years since A64/Northwood. A 4Ghz system with PCIE 3850 might get you like 200fps at 1024x768, where your old P4 3.2Ghz or X2 4800 will be far behind, but at 1600x1200 4xAA with high quality settings the difference will narrow down to something like 50fps vs 40fps, and by the time you get to 1920x1200 you need much faster video card (ie 3870x2) to show any difference.

Nick:
My experience with P4C (Northwood), Prescott and P4EE systems is that in grand scheme of things they are about the same, clock for clock. IMHO dual core or HT doesn't help for games, with the few exceptions of Supreme Commander.

sorry, to clarify:
You're not CPU bottlenecked. You're just not stressing GPU enough... not using high enough game settings, resolution and AA.

the pictures of the cards at newegg show the powercolor with a six pin power connecter,the sapphire with an eight pin connecter. does anyone know why the difference and what could be the effect? thanks

2nd post above mine ^^^^

I ran two tests, 3d mark 05 and the ati tray tools benchmark. 3d mark 05 produced an extra 300 marks with both cores running at the identical speed. I believe that is down to the step SSE3 and the extra 512kb of cache.

ATI tray tools on the other hand gave me double the points after i swapped the northwood for the presscott. Northwood is a much cooler CPU and even though the Presscott runs hotter it seems to overclock better as well.

We all have our different systems and on mine the Presscott justifies my bottleneck issue.

I am running a P4 2.6 ghz, 2.5 Gb DDR ram (considering upgrading to 4 Gb). Will my performance be bottlenecked for this card and are there any links that provide solid information about system bottlenecks for video cards? Skeptical opinions tend to slow the decision process even faster.

I currently have:

-AMD 939 4800 x2
-nForce 3 mobo
-2GB RAM
-ATI x1950 Pro AGP

If I upgrade to the 3850 how much of a performance increase can I expect in frame rates over the x1950 Pro? Also, how does the power consumption compare to the x1950 Pro?

Thanks

post above i think performance will be noticeably better. my rig is about the same spec as yours but on still on the fence. a new motherboard,fast ddr2 and an am2 cpu are about the same price imo.

I am the poster from two posts above, who listed his system specs and asked a few questions. Well I have some answers.

I bought the 3850 AGP and here's what I found. Performance in 3d games and applications increased by 25-35% depending on the game. Not as much as I thought it would be. I suspect that I am getting CPU/mobo bottlenecked, so this will be my last AGP card. Power consumption was nearly identical at idle and actually a few watts less during full load compared to the x1950 Pro. That was impressive.

Drivers are still an issue. I had to use the Hotfix drivers found on Sapphire's website. No others would install.

Rob,

I have similar PC setup for crysis so I am amping to get this card. thanks for the comment.

Are using any AGP as in 2x 4x etc? Everytime I enable it, I get CTD after the load completes. This is with the HD2600XT, am hoping the HD3850 won't crash out there

LD

No more RAM won't improve performance unless your motherboard supports dual channel. Mine doesn't and when one of my corsair modules failed leaving me with 1gb of ram I got higher scores all around.

Ive got s P4 3.4 ghz gallatin core Extreme edition with 2 mb l3 cache....the SL7CH. the best socket 478 imho.
will this bottleneck the card?

Bottleneck schmottleneck. The 3850 is still faster, has higher IQ, lower power useage, and more features than any previous AGP card so it is irrelevant if the CPU does not allow the GPU to be utilized to its full potential. Did I mention it would still increase performance? No way could there not be significant benefit over a X1950XT or 7950GT.

Lil Dave

I've not tried it With AA enable...I figured it would just lower my fps Even more .My settings are 1024x768 no AA NO VSINC.But everything else is on high settings And in the timedemo My average is 21fps.I know that is not the greatest But for me It is still fun to play and looks really good

Sorry about that I forgot To put my name