Best AGP card for older system?

First of all, what kind of crashing that is? Blue screens? Just shutting down? Something else?

Secondly, do you want to upgrade your PC or just solve the issue? Because first I'd advise solving it, because it might not even be the graphics card that's at fault.

The crashing is different every time. Most often times its the blue screen of death where it says something about data dumping. Other times it just freezes and the cursor is frozen. Other times, its just a garbled, pixelated mess on screen.

I do NOT want to upgrade my entire PC. Thing is I built this in 2005 but I dropped a LOT of money buying stuff that would last me as long as possible. I bought a 64 bit capable processor just to eke out every cent I dropped on this machine. If I were to upgrade my PC, whenever that is, I would again do the same thing and get the best thing available that would last me the longest rather than getting something middle of the line that I will have to replace much quicker. Besides that, I can't afford upgrading my entire PC.

I am all for solving it as well. Hey, if the graphics card still has the ability - then I am all for it.

Here is a description of what happened recently:

Everything was working great up until a month ago when I upgraded my OS to Windows 7-64bit from Windows Vista 32 bit. I used to play WoW all the time with no problems. Sure it was a little slow and my resolution was not that great but it still worked. But after upgrading my OS to 64 bit Windows 7, the system started crashing during WoW games or Youtube videos.

This is what ATI/AMD's page says about my card.
Note: AMD’s DirectX 9 ATI Radeon graphics accelerators are not officially supported under Windows 7. If the user chooses to, they can install the ATI Catalyst Windows Vista graphics driver under Windows 7. Please be aware that none of the new Windows 7 graphics driver (WDDM 1.1) features are supported (as the Windows Vista level graphics driver is limited to WDDM 1.0 level support).

So I rolled back my drivers to the 32 bit Vista ones but I still end up crashing. Not sure what is going on.

Can you run a memtest and prim95 to ensure that your Ram and CPU is fine?

For your edification, I think the best card out there for AGP is the HD 4670:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=E...

At least AFAIK.

Yeah, I keep seeing that Radeon HD 4670 but the only problem is that is soooo expensive! Its almost 120 bucks for that! That was the same price as it was 3 years ago! I don't get why an old AGP card is twice as expensive as a newer model PCI Express video card. Is there anything that is 2nd best that is cheaper? I keep reading about bottlenecks and don't really know if because of my system that the video card will be able to utilize its full capacity.

did you get any results on memtest and prim95?

Yea you need to run memtest and prime95 to make sure your CPU and memory is OK. That AGP card is so expensive because it's the most powerful AGP card in the world, and there is still big demand for it - and since it's not manufactured anymore, that's why it's so expensive.

Laws of supply and demand would probably be the reason. Not much call now for old agp cards, therefore more expensive for manufacturers to produce.

Put into that they also add another chip to the card so that the GPU can use the AGP bus (Basically it is a chip that makes it turns PCI-Express into AGP). You will notice the chip on the back of the card right next to the AGP connector if you check the pictures. So even if the card should be cheaper than it is it would still be more expensive than a PCI-Express version because it is more expensive to produce.

Its not just the graphics card that could be your problem. Your motherboard is too old . Its own drivers might not even be supported under Windows 7. I am afraid that even if you buy a new graphics card, you will still have the same problem. I suppose you just roll back to the Vista 32 & save that Win7 64 bit to your next built. After all, with only 3GB RAM, you do not need to go Win 7 64bit at all because the 32-bit supports the 3GB.

Just to toss in another wrinkle, it could be that your power supply is starting to fail. Which power supply do you have installed in this system?

-Wolf sends

the HIS hd 4670 agp video card will make a world of difference on the graphics you're experiencing now, and it also comes with an HDMI port. however, I can't say if what causes your system to crash is your video card, but you can try. I personally have the 4670 on a lan party 250gb UT motherboard with athlon 64 3700+ and it works great. I play movies (not in HD) from netflix and i can play games like league of legends. also very old games run at 60 fps no problem all under windows 7 ultimate 32 bit.

there's a very long argument however if the 4670 is better or worse thatn the 3850, but the 4670 is the only agp video card on the market at the moment, and the 3850 is only sold in places like ebay.

if you go to http://weishare.net/ and search "AMD Athlon(TM) 64 P" without the quotes, you'll see the peformance gain you'll get when you upgrade to a 4670 (mine is the 6.7 graphics card). the 3850 i've seen go up to a 7.0~7.2 when overclocked

just make sure when you get the 4670 you install the agp hotfix drivers from amd instead of the pcie drivers.
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/CatalystAGPH...

i think the latest is 12.4, but i forgot where the link is. i hope this helps!