AGP gaming in August 2009

[Uriel]

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/agp-radeon-overclocking,review-31662.html

Interesting little article over at Tomshardware. It caught my eye because they're using the same motherboard as me. Long time since I used AGP though.

Love this old motherboard. It was one of the few that had both full AGP 8x and PCI-E 16x (rather than either being limited). It's seen me through an AGP 6600GT, AGP 6800GT, PCI-E X1800XT, PCI-E 8800GT and now a PCI-E HD4850.

Had it since 2006, I think. It's coming to the end of its useful upgradability but it's served me well.

 

[Dantian]

This board is a bit of a blast from thepast for me, spent ages deciding do i stick with my agp board or go for this in case i had the cash to upgrade my gpu later on. Unfortunately i stuck with my old agp MB, not the best decision i've ver made.


Still, its an interesting article, supprised to see something like that these days.

 

[HangTime]

Yeah nice to see some benchmarks run on older hardware, obviously serious gamers will have moved on by now but the HD 3850 certainly seems OK when paired with an overclocked X2.

Of course the problem is that while things are better than they were a couple of years ago, there is still a premium attached to AGP cards. The HD3850 costs about the same as a PCI-E 4850/GTS250 which are both much faster cards. For many people a secondhand mobo/cpu/ram bundle paired with a new PCI-E gfx card will be a more attractive upgrade path unless they are fortunate enough to have an X2 and plenty of RAM.

 

[ATI_Karl]

Nice review there. I feel like doing a spare rig, iff my main one dies

 

[FatRakoon]

I still have a DFI LanParty 250UT with a Newcastle 3000 @ 2.4 and thats got a 6800GT.

Sure, its not going to rock anyones boat by todays or even yesterdays standards but its stil la hell of a lot more powerful than a lot of the junk you can buy these days and it plays most games fairly well.

It has been my daughters PC until only recently and it plays games like UnReal Tournament 2004 just fine, and the only reason why I have upgraded it is because its not as smooth as the other PCs when playing UT3, but it still plays it!!!

 

[Uriel]

Yeah nice to see some benchmarks run on older hardware, obviously serious gamers will have moved on by now but the HD 3850 certainly seems OK when paired with an overclocked X2.

Of course the problem is that while things are better than they were a couple of years ago, there is still a premium attached to AGP cards. The HD3850 costs about the same as a PCI-E 4850/GTS250 which are both much faster cards. For many people a secondhand mobo/cpu/ram bundle paired with a new PCI-E gfx card will be a more attractive upgrade path unless they are fortunate enough to have an X2 and plenty of RAM.

It's the main reason why this board was so handy for me. I managed to sell my AGP 6800GT for more than I bought it for and replace it with a much more powerful PCI-E card for not much more money. Same with 939 and DDR to AM2 and DDR2.

Anyone running this board in their gaming rig would be nuts to still be using AGP.