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.


In the long run yes, seeing as the AGP Radeon 4650 is twice the price of the PCI-Express version anyway, so there's some money saved right there anyway. In the case that you have one of these ridiculous Socket 939 ASRock boards with the AM2 daughterboard...I mean really? You'd rather buy an overpriced GPU, new RAM and an outdated CPU so that you don't have to buy an ENTIRELY new motherboard? It's not even worth it.
Yes because buying a new motherboard AND cpu AND memory AND gfx card is cheaper than buying a gfx card and overclocking your cpu isnt it?
In the long run yes, seeing as the AGP Radeon 4650 is twice the price of the PCI-Express version anyway, so there's some money saved right there anyway. In the case that you have one of these ridiculous Socket 939 ASRock boards with the AM2 daughterboard...I mean really? You'd rather buy an overpriced GPU, new RAM and an outdated CPU so that you don't have to buy an ENTIRELY new motherboard? It's not even worth it.
IIRC, I said better not cheaper. Sure thing, you could save some money by buying AGP chips for your aging components. Spending $100 for an AGP card that is way below the performance of the equally-priced 4850. Is it worth it? No. For the mean time, you could survive playing at low settings but how long will your system hold on? By the time your system quits, you might be even thinking if you should've saved that $100 and just upgraded the whole system for the long run. This AGP cards recently released are just a remedy, not a solution. Still a full upgrade is an imminent path that those with old systems must take.
I think i would be a good idea, but the web y your, of course, but it will be fine for this people that say the 3850 AGP is not fine, the would see they are completly wrong.
It's my main computer.
It's my main computer.
Don't even bother upgrading because its still crap.
Either buy a new machine or don't even bother.
Did you actually look at the benchmarks? I'm running a PC about the same speed as the one being tested here and play most games at 1680x1050 with most details up fairly high or at max. I can't use heavy anti-aliasing but at 1680x I don't really need that too badly.
And my CPU isn't overclocked so that isn't necessary at all. The old dual core cpu's from AMD are dirt cheap, at any speed so there really isn't a need to buy a middle of the road one
So where did this 1024x crap come from? There isn't a single game out that I could only run at 1024x. The lowest res I'll select is a widescreen 1280x which can look just fine considering how old this PC is.
This is aimed at the article. I have the 3850 and have no problems using the overclocking built into the driver. Not sure why that wasn't an option for you guys.
thanks... enjoyed that article.
Wasn't expecting to see such a different between the O/C and the non O/C setup.
What about the people who have been using this same system for years and are still finding it holds up for most games? I'd be one of these.
As for upgrading an AGP card now. Well that would depend entirely on funds. From a performance perspective of course it would ideal to buy a whole new set of components but if money is tight, a top of the line AGP card does hold its own today and its today you'll be using it. Without the money to upgrade to more modern hardware you can't really blame a lack of future proofing as that's just not an option for those people on a budget in this situation.
Overclock my X2 3800+. Damn. It's only 4 years old.
Well, upgrading an Agp system diserves only in you already have a 3850 AGP, or if you already have a 939 o AM2 motherboard with a dual-core proccesor and if the motherboard only aceppts AGP cards.
For example upgrading a PC with a pentium 4 and a 1600 pro AGP card would be stupid, but upgrading a pentium 4 that already has a 3850 AGP oe 4670 AGP, will be fine for most os games.
There is one point of atention about the processor, if your processor is an dual-core 939 you must overclock it, by the other hand, if your processor is an AM2, like Athlon 5xxx o 7xxx you don´t need to overclock it, because ther is no bottleneck, or no so much between the am2 processor an the 3850/4670 AGP card.
Heres a better idea - forget "future proof" and forget "upgrading an old machine" (within reason) - my pc's usually survive 1 overhaul and 1 upgrade package then there scrapped etc - MUCH better lifespan
example: my rig started as a E6600 @ 3.2 + 2gb + 7900GT, and in one big batch i jumped to a Q6600, 8gb and 8800GT - final upgrade for it before i get a new rig.
And as for AGP vs PCIE - if i remember correctly, atleast with the Nvidia 6600GT the AGP variants were actually quicker then the PCIE variants and had to be underclocked to line up performance - AGP (8x) being "slow" compared to PCIE (1.0) is a myth.