Is this AGP Graphics Card going to Bottleneck?

[smonkyness]

Hi,

I am creating a new system from some other peoples spare parts. The problem is the motherboard has an AGP socket (ASUS A8V Socket 939).
I was wondering whether my ram and processor would be sufficient to support the graphics card/s i am thinking of:

Ati HD3850
or wait for the AGP version of 4000 series, 4670 i believe
(which i would love to head towards)
taken from this article: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/14067/65/

My Processor and RAM are:
Opteron 170 dual-core (2.0ghz i believe)
2gb Mushkin Redline XP4000
(these should be fairly overclockable)

Can anyone help me? Is this going to massively bottleneck?

Its been about 6 or 7 years since i've built a pc, im a little out of date.
Money is an issue, thats why the majority are spare parts.

 

[smonkyness]

can anyone help me?

I could for a lot cheaper go with a second hand x1950xt. Which I dont think would be bottlenecked by the cpu n ram.

 

[Pogostickio]

Hi,

I use a very similar system to yourself. Quite scary really.

Asus A8V socket 939
Opteron 185 - overclocked 8% to 2.8gig
dual channel 2 paired 1 gig sticks of DDR400 3200 memory
ATI 3850 AGP DDR3 512mb

Recently I was over at guru3d.com and someone asked a similar question to yourself. Take a peek at my replies. And I would ignore the AGP version of the 4670 if I were you. The 3850 is still the king. With the supplied link is also another link to a 4670 vs 3850 review, and the 3850 comes out on top.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?p=3138945#post3138945

Hope this helps.


Pogo

 

[smonkyness]

that thread heavily sways to the 3850.
Im wondering because i may have a little bottlenecking, the 4670 and 3850 will be even similar performance on my spec computer.

The other thing is my monitors native resolution is 1280x1024, im happy with that, and the monitor.
A 256bit memory architecture would perhaps be a little wasted on those pixels? Can anyone give me a reason to go for 256bit memory paths other than increased high resolution performance.

Perhaps its a better idea to future protect a little, my computer with the excelled performance of AA and AF improvements on the 4670 series card. As i do remember hearing things about future games having a certain amount of minimal forced AA or AF?? Is that Directx11 or something? (please dont take this too off topic)

 

[Hindesite]

Technically you're going to get the best AGP performance out there right now with a 3850. If you've got an 8-pin power connector on your power supply, this is as good as AGP gets:
Radeon HD 3850 512MB AGP8X - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102730

However, a 4650 will run cooler and take less power (no 8-pin connector required):
Radeon HD 4650 1GB AGP8X - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125281

I'd go with the 4650, personally. It's technically got a little less horsepower but it's a better engineered card at the same time with better AA/AF support and far less power needed to run stable, which I like.

 

[smonkyness]

I am heading towards the 4670 thats going to be released soon by powercolor. hopefully easily obtained here in the uk. Ill should running the x1950xt in the mean time.

So I still have time to debate it more.
Would be nice to have a bit more imput about the bottlenecking issue.

A strong piece of information I found, and what im kind of trying to ascertain about the cards ive mentioned, was a small review about a 4870 on this link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131140
by 'Astrogiblet' saying:
"This is a very powerful card. Make sure you have a processor able to power this. I started off with a 2.3ghz Phenom 9600 quad core and I was only able to get about 40% of the performance out of this card. In Fallout 3, I had to play at medium-low settings. COD 4 on high settings I was getting 30-40fps. When I switched to a 3.0ghz Phenom II, I was able to get full performance out of this 4870 and now I am able to play Fallout 3 at full settings without lag. Keep in mind that Clock speed per core is more important than how many cores you have, as 98% of video games are still not multithreaded. For a modern video card such as this, a processor that is at least 2.8ghz per core is a must!"javascript:%20validform(this);

That talks about quad cores! at whopping high speeds in comparison to what im jumping on board with.

Im just still unsatisfied lol. hrmm

 

[smonkyness]

well the x1950 is actually broken