Best AGP Card for ~£135
Best AGP Card for £135 (inc VAT):
| Codename: | RV670 |
| Process: | 55nm |
| Universal Shaders: | 320 |
| Texture Units: | 16 |
| ROPs: | 16 |
| Memory Bus: | 256-bit |
| Core Speed MHz: | 670 |
| Memory Speed MHz: | 833 (1666 effective) |
| DirectX / Shader Model: | DX 10.1 / SM 4.0 |
Forever rumored and now finally available for purchase, the Radeon 3850 is frankly, a seriously powerful card for the aging AGP bus. It’s even maybe a little too powerful to be properly utilized on the single-core CPUs that are typically paired with this platform.
Regardless, this is the most powerful AGP card you can get. Perhaps you have an AGP gaming system you just can’t bear to part with, or perhaps you have a bizarre motherboard that has both a dual-core CPU and AGP slot. Whatever the reason, you can’t do better than an AGP 3850, and if anyone ever releases a more powerful card in the future for the dying bus, we’ll be incredibly surprised.
What About this Other Card That’s Not On The List? How Do I Know If It’s A Good Deal?
This question always crops up. This is because both stock levels and prices change so quickly. So how do you know if that card you’ve got your eye on is a good buy in its price range?
Here are two resources to help you judge if a card is a good buy or not. The first is the graphics card hierarchy chart, which groups graphics cards with similar overall performance into "tiers.” The top tier contains the highest performing cards available, and performance decreases as you go down the tiers from there.
I was really hoping you guys would wait until the release of the 9800GTX and 9800GX2 before doing something like this again but such is the nature of schedules and deadlines. At least there'll be some good in-depth reviews on these cards individually (or together) when they come out
It's a regular monthly round-up, and never long till the next one!
I really find the graphics hierarchy a really helpful thing, although it was easier to read when it was done in table format as previous ;-)
I cant wait until the Q3/Q4 or even early 2009 I'm holding out to see what AMD have instore (not much I'd suspect (compared to Intel), Intel have the next quad core batch lined up and a new stepping, but I'm really waiting for the new Nehalem CPU as that appears to be the next gen CPU.
Once that comes out I will think about what I'm going to upgrade to GPU and Mobo.
I suppose Tom's not being the extreme site it used to be, the huge overclocking potential of the GTS 512 is of little interest.
I've taken mine from 650/1625/972 (core/shader/memory) to 762/1900/1130, and the temperature under load with a waterblock never goes over 40C. People who have voltage modded their cards have seen completion of 3dmark06 at 918/2268/2250 on air.
With no competition Nvidia just aren't pushing G92 as far as it can go, which is way further than the Ultra that pushed G80 to the limit.
wow, i didn't expect that the rage 128 would be listed
to anyone who has one (i'd be surprised)
I think there's one in my iBook
Where do the ATI HD 3870, HD 3870 XT and 3870 X2 fit into this list? With their massive clocks and number of stream processors, don't these cards blow all current Nvidia cards out of the water?
sckoobs: You did read the article didn't you? The current Nvidia cards out perform the current ATI cards by a good margin. I just got my 8800GT this week and I'm loving it. great performance. I'm now able to run Crysis with x2 AA at all high settings getting about 45-50fps average. It'll be interesting to see how the 9800 GTX and GX2 compares to the ultra. I'll be looking forward to you reivew on them
Hmm just been looking and its actually cheaper to get the two 8800GT's than it is to get the two 9600 GT's if you're going for EVGA cards at least..