Hd3850 vs hd4650

*Those above links do not work

I am currently learning about the same thing. (http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/page-265844_15_0.ht...) please help lol, you might be interested.

But, from what i have looked up about those two cards, the 3850 is deffinately the better. It's just with the 4000 series, there are fixed issues with Anti-Aliasing and Anistropic Filtering 'AA and AF'. The 4 series card should perform better with those settings on.

Having said that the 4600 series cards hav a 128bit memory path, as appose to the 3850 having 256-bit and the other 4800 series awsomeness.
I believe that 'pretty much' means any card with 256bit paths will do better at resolutions over about 1240x1024 (maybe quite a bit better)

The last thing would be that the 4000 series cards have heavily improved on power consumption. They are a lot easier on your system.

Hi. I'm also on an AGP platform and I replied to someone else asking a similar question to yourself. In the link below you'll find quite a bit of info from me (Pogostickio) regarding the fun i'm having even though I'm still AGP.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?p=3138945#post3...

Hope this helps.



Pogo

Well the 1GB of RAM on the 4600 cards can be misleading. That GPU really doesn't benefit much at all from anything over 512MBs. Also, the 4650 is not equal to a 3850. A 4670 is actually a revamped 3850 that takes less power and runs cooler. In actuality, a 3870 would beat a 4670 pretty easily. That's not a big deal though as the 4600 series isn't ATI's performance line, that would be the 4800 series. The 4600s are for people in need of low power/small case/budget setups.

All of that said, I've personally used a 4670 and I think it's an absolutely fantastic card for the price. Here's one for less then $60 after mail-in rebate:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...
 

But if you are looking for a more powerful card and have an unused 6-pin PCI-E power cable on your power supply, this Radeon 4830 will give you even more bang for your buck at just $80 after mail-in rebate:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...