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Sapphire HD 3850 AGP - THE LAST ?

Associate
Joined
2 Jan 2007
Posts
55
hello

i have a HIS ATI RADEON X1950 PRO AGP GRAPHICS CARD, and i am thinking of buying a Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 3850 AGP - is this card the last outing on agp or should i wait and see if there will be any new agp cards.
 
Associate
Joined
7 Feb 2007
Posts
160
Location
Gloucestershire, UK
As far as I know the ATI 3850 is the last descent AGP card.

My question to you, Is there going to be much of a gain by upgrading to the ATI 3850 ? ? ?

The X1950 is a pretty good card and depending on what CPU you have, you'll probably find your CPU being the limit of your system and not the graphics card.

Might be worth noting on here what your system specs are so people could give a fair comment.
 
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Soldato
Joined
16 Jul 2007
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7,691
Location
Stoke on Trent
Probably.....

The nvidia 7 series was the last of the AGP cards, then the x1950pro was the last last AGP card and then the 3850 was the last last last AGP card.

I only moved to PCI-E about a year ago mainly because I still had a half decent PC at the time (A64 3800+ x2 @2.6ghz, 2gig ddr400 and x1950pro). I read that some countries (I think china was the main one) hadn't really moved over to PCI-E and so there was still a market for companies making AGP cards.

Almost everyone here will advise you to do a full upgrade and they are right. You could buy an e5200 and 4 gig of DDR2 and have a huge choice of graphics cards for not very much at all.
 
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Man of Honour
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3 Apr 2003
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Cambridge
Jeggsy: the 3850 is quite a big jump up from the 1950Pro. It is also DX10 class, meaning nice effects (where you can notice them) and has native HD decoding.

OP: as posted above, the Geforce 7xxx series were meant to be the last AGP cards (they were for Nvidia, but hey); the Radeon 19xx series were the last ones for ATI/AMD, and then the 3850 came out. However, there has been no 4xxx series AGP card as yet, so it's not looking good. But that has never really meant anything.
 
Soldato
Joined
7 Nov 2007
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Required
If he's on AGP though the best CPU he could have would be a AMD 939 dual-core or a Core 2 Duo/Quad but using an ASRock-dual thingymobob (and on them afaik the AGP bus runs through the PCI bus, crippling performance)
 
Associate
Joined
7 Feb 2007
Posts
160
Location
Gloucestershire, UK
I'm still running an old AGP based system myself. If it was me I'd save the money and put it towards a whole new system/big upgrade.

The price of an ATI 3850 would be the cost of a new motherboard. Not much more would get you a sensible CPU and DDR2 is cheap.... Sorted ! !
 
Associate
OP
Joined
2 Jan 2007
Posts
55
Specifications

dell dimension 8300
2 gig ddr 400mhz
p4 3.00ghz stock - cant overclock on dell machine
x1950 pro agp
530 watt enermax psu
x-fi extreme gamer sound card - 5.1 speakers
17 tft
 
Soldato
Joined
1 Jun 2007
Posts
4,168
I once had a Dell dimenison 8300.... Upgraded it from a FX5200 to a 7600gt.... but even then I was CPU limited :eek:

Worst upgrade EVER and a waste of money!!

Save your hard earned and get a cheap core 2 system :) You won't regret it :p
________
Weed News
 
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