It's been on the cards for a while now but finally it's here, AGP's last hurrah!

http://www.vr-zone.com/articles/Sa [...] /5479.html

No prices as yet but expect at least 20% higher than PCI-X

Thats bada**!!

i dont see it in the sappire website...

Thanks for the "heads up". That makes two now, with PowerColor. And VisionTek is also rumored to produce this card.

Blimey, won't AGP ever die??

I hope Sapphire releases a 3850 Atomic card
The 3870 version looks TIGHT!!
It even comes with a 9foot HDMI cable!!
http://www.overclockersclub.com/re [...] 3780/2.htm

I've been hearing that for a few years...

20% higher b/c I thought that when I finally upgraded my PC, everyone else would've already done theirs!

It seems like it won't, ethel. Then again, spending $200 on a dying interface doesn't make much sense.

It might be a dying interface but there is a lot of people out there with socket 939 boards X2 processor 2gb ram and AGP slot. There is no reason for them to upgrade CPU yet so a powerful AGP card extends the life of their rigs.

For socket 939 or maybe Pentium D its definetely a good buy but surely not for single cored Pen 4 or Athlon XP i think for these cpu's even ATi X1950 Pro will be bottleneck in 80% games can't understand why people are still buying these cards for such slow procesors

8 Pin power conector bloody hell what kind of PSU are you going to need for that ? Im doubting anybody who has a shop bought AGP rig with a Athalon or P4 will have the power to run one of these any way.
Mactronix

AGP for president! Naughty Naughty!

You can buy Molex -> PCI-E power adapters, and most cards will come with one.

There are people who have dual-processor or dual-core systems with AGP, or even highly clocked single core Athlon64 systems that could still make use of a card like this.

So what sort of power are we looking at then because i have been all over the net and can only find the pcie spec which still dosent give Amps just that you need an extra 6pin 75 watt power cable so thats 75 from the slot and if it wants all the other 75 thats 150 watts = 12.5 amps. That cant be right can it?
Mactronix

I will have to agree with that. I am tempted to snag one of these to pep up my AGP system before my next build but I am not sure if my system will utilize that much GPU. I am sure it will help but I bet I won't even be able to push that card to where it should be performing.

I remember seeing a post where someone upgraded to an x1950 Pro or maybe even an HD 2600 from something like an x800 and saw something like ~5% performance increase. They were running off a 478 socket mobo. If you search hard you might be able to find the post but I bet their system was just too old. It is like that time I slipped speed into my grandpa's OJ...nothing really happened...no JK that never happened.

Yeah but anyway, AGP is a little funky since you are pairing up newer technology on the GPU side with what could be ancient CPU / mobo chipset technology. It is tough to say which AGP card will top out an old system and I think there will be a lot of angry people that find out that their brand new 3850 yields surprisingly low performance gains to the point that they think they have a defective card.

Hi people,

You made me register so that I could explain all this. I'm an AGP user and I want a 3850 AGP (I prefer the Sapphire version because it apparently has a single slot cooling system and I need my slots).

Athlon XP ? Single core P4 ? NO! I have Pentium 3!!! What you don't get is that before multi-core, the world had multi-processor systems. I have two of the latest P3s, at 1.4 GHz. As far as I know the chipset in my machine is the only one ever made that supports P3 and RDRAM. I got the RDRAMs for cheap (yeah, yeah, just luck) and I have 2 GB of ram. So, basically, it's like a dual-core 1.4 and with 2 GB of RDRAM (which by the way, works at 400 MHz, just like DDR-400). I ran some processor tests and apparently I outscored a P4 3 GHz with HyperThreading. Not by much (something like 100 points when both scores were over 2000), but I did. Dual, quad, even 8-processor systems existed before multi-core CPUs. That's where you can fit these powerful cards.
I just got a SATA controller for my machine. Upgrade the old things right and they will be close to modern systems performance. I can't compare my system with one of the latest dual cores, but I don't need maximum performance, just enough so that some of the latest things work on it. 3ds Max works, Photoshop works, Far Cry works and would've looked nice if I had a video card like the 3850, etc. Maybe even Crysis would work.
Some friend of mine has a P4 3 GHz with HT. He wanted Vista, installed it, and it worked fine (as in, no delay between clicking and the command actually happening).
Mind you, I have another friend looking to get the best single-core Pentium for a system he's building. He already got the 3850 PCIe for it, he'll get an Abit motherboard. I looked around and that processor is an Extreme Edition running at something like 3.7 GHz, which I read can be overclocked to 4.1 or something with just a good cooler and a little voltage increase! And the guy who said this on some forum was very happy about his system and unwilling to upgrade (don't know wether it was because of arrogance or just no need).

Someone asked me to build a system on a limited budget. I had to get an ASRock motherboard with AGP because it was cheap. The maximum configuration for that system is 2 GB DDR-400 in dual channel, and a QX6700 processor - quad core, extreme edition, factory clocked at 2.66 GHz, overclockable.

PCIe is faster, indeed. But AGP isn't that crap. As soon as I get that video card I'll try out Doom 3, for instance. Again, older systems, upgraded rightly, perform ok. Not super, just ok.

Thats a bit snobby, that $200 will preserve an older system that would cost alot more to replace.

yeah but then again i have a 2nd system with a dual core p4, agpx8 slot and a 6600gt. That system would benefit from a 3850. Theres probably more than a few people out there who would benefit from a peppy vid card upgrade.

Press Release:
http://www.sapphiretech.com/en/pressfiles/79_reg1.doc