AGP Cards for ~£100

Best AGP Card for £100 (inc VAT): Wait AGP cards are getting increasingly harder to find, and at the time of writing we were unable to locate a X1950 PRO or 7900 GS in the UK for under £200. We’re not willing to recommend either of those cards for that price, especially with the Radeon 3850 coming to AGP. While the 3850 has been seen in the UK for sale, we can no longer find it online and assume at this point that the manufacturers are only making a very limited stock. Time will tell if more of these AGP super-cards will show up in the future, but for now the Radeon 2600 XT is a good stopgap card for those of you still clinging to the AGP interface.

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.

You can use this hierarchy to compare the pricing between two cards, to see which one is a better deal but also to determine if an upgrade is worthwhile. I don’t recommend upgrading your graphics card unless the replacement card is at least three tiers higher. Otherwise, the upgrade is on a par with what you have and you may not notice a worthwhile difference in performance.

At the request of readers I have added mobile and integrated chipsets to the hierarchy chart. I want to make it clear that there is very little performance data available for these graphic solutions. While the discrete video chipsets on the chart are placed with a lot of information in mind, many of the laptop chipset positions on the chart are “guesstimates” based on their specifications. At worst I don’t think they’re more than a tier away from their actual performance but this is something to keep in mind when considering mobile graphic chipsets.