You've got an older AGP-equipped system lying around. After checking out our last AGP article, you've accepted that the old girl won't be a valuable addition to LAN parties anymore. But before you go and donate it to your auntie for basic Internet use, hold on a minute. There might be some gaming goodness left in that system.
To recap, in part one of our little AGP Revival, we paired the latest and greatest AGP graphics cards with a fairly typical older platform. This system was equipped with an AGP motherboard, a dual-core Athlon X2 3800+ CPU, and 2GB of DDR memory. While the AGP bus didn't seem to be too much of a limiting factor, the CPU certainly turned out to be quite the bottleneck.
While this isn't a desirable situation to be in for a gamer, due to the limited CPU upgrade options today, it does lend itself to some affordable overclocking. The beauty of a CPU bottleneck (if you want to call it that) is that overclocking so effectively circumvents them. While graphics card overclocks usually produce relatively limited results, overclocking the CPU of a processor-bottlenecked system can show some big gains.
Let's clear something up first, though: this route won't work for everyone with an AGP system. In order for your older, overclocked processor to keep up with a higher-end graphics card, you're going to need an AGP motherboard that can handle a dual-core CPU at the very least, because a majority of new games need a minimum of two cores for good performance. That means your AGP motherboard must support AMD's Socket 939, AM2, or Intel's LGA 775 interface.
With these basic guidelines covered, let's look into the specifics of how we can squeeze the most performance from our old AGP system, while spending the least amount of cash.


And is not more likely that increasing memory bandwidth by more than 100% (with a similar or smaller latency) had a big part to play?
Surely it would have been a more thorough test to use the Socket 939 3800+.
Favourite motherboard I've ever owned. Modders are busily trying to squeeze Phenom compatibility in the BIOS but it remains to be seen if they'll ever manage it.
Still annoyed at NVIDIA for killing off ULI's brilliant chipset R&D team.
Good point actually. There are some huge jumps there. Something's gone awry here.
Don't forget the Ram is now DDR2, running faster and in dual channel mode. That might have helped.
Or you could have spent a little more on a much faster processor, like an Athlon 64 X2 6000+ at 3.1 Ghz for $75.
Costs an extra hour or two salary, saves you several hours wasting time overclocking and you get to keep your warranty.
The main thing this article proves is that ASRock made a nicely upgradeable motherboard
well done for writing quite possibly the single most pointless article I've ever read on this website
Costs an extra hour or two salary, saves you several hours wasting time overclocking and you get to keep your warranty
Problem with that is that the 4200+ is practically supported out of the box ... but you'll need to find a custom bios for anything as new as the 3.1GHz 6k+ ... and if memory serves, the board had a few teething problems with the 65nm chips to begin with. Though that may have been remedied by now.
It is an awesome motherboard though. I managed to overclock a 3700+ (San Siego core) to 2.86GHz stable ... FX57 performance for £150 at the time
Oh? Don't know about that ASRock but my 3 year old motherboard with a 2 year old standard BIOS (09/2007) handles it fine...
Is it possible for you to create some kind of database telling us what clockspeed is required to roughly match specific GPUs? You wouldn't need to cover Netburst/K7, just Stars, Core 2, Nehalem, maybe K8. Now that would be ultimate resource in what card to buy.
Using the AM2CPU board, it supports up to an FX62 or X2 5200+ with an official BIOS. Up to X2 6400+ were supported with a beta BIOS.
Old Tomshardware used to do such useful tables, but doing that kind of thing now would require more than copy and paste journalism which is all we get anymore
IIRC from forum reading, 5600+, 6000+ and 6400+ would work but weren't detected correctly by 2.3. 2.31 reports them correctly.
3800+
However since most of the other manufacturers don't offer such an upgrade I think the majority of s939 users are going to struggle, and for several reasons:
. AGP lock, or rather the lack of
. Expensive dual-core s939 CPU's, e.g. the x2 3800+.
. 90nm CPU process that whilst relatively cool, requires a decent m/b for overclocking, together with a capable PSU.
There are overclocking options, but you need to be careful with what you're doing. It largely depends on your board and it's chipset. I still like these older CPU's for overclocking, due to their flexible design: +20% more power despite two cores; tolerance of high bus speeds and flexible memory handling for cheapskates like me, who use mixed unbranded memory. Even on cheap boards it's not uncommon for the x2 3800+ to high 2.4GHz or higher..but of course, that makes them popular and therefore absurdly priced on the auction sites.
So in the end I'd rather bin the project and go for something more modern. As the article says, you're buying into old technology that is soon to be outdated. I'd rather sell the parts (if you have a 3800+ you'll get a good price for it), and get and AM2+/AM3 board with an AMD Athlon II 240 or higher.