Radeon 3850 AGP Plus Single-Core CPU

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Overclocking Attempts

We did try to overclock our Radeon 3850 AGP to see if we could squeeze any extra performance out of it. We were quite keen to demonstrate if the AGP 3850 could keep up with its 3870 cousin at identical clock speeds, to further examine if the AGP bus was causing any slowdowns (even though most of our benchmarks show that this is not the case).

Unfortunately, ATI’s Overdrive utility was completely uncooperative in this respect. Even though it was happy to change the clock speeds of the PCI Express version of the Radeon 3870, the drivers would not work on the AGP version of the card.

With no other working overclocking tools — we mentioned earlier in the review that we couldn’t get ATItool or ATI tray tools to work — we were unable to test this aspect of the card’s performance. Indeed, it looks as though this functionality isn’t supported in Vista at this time.

We also wanted to overclock the Athlon 3400+ CPU to see if we could up the ante and remove some of the CPU bottleneck, but we were once again foiled. To get the system running with 2 GB of memory, we had to use a Frankenstein mishmash of old DDR RAM that wasn’t particularly happy to accommodate any overclocking efforts. And to get any speed out of the CPU we had to slow down the RAM, which doesn’t tell us much, so we’ll have to wait until Part 2 of this review to see if a CPU change will significantly move the bottleneck. We should be able to secure some faster and more cooperative DDR memory by then as well, and we’ll be able to compare single and dual core CPU overclocking.

Don Woligroski
104 Comments Comment from the forums
  • nofxman
    This is the best article I have read lately, I installed AOC on an old desktop with a 2.8 P4 and vanilla 6600 and it ran like crap. I was debating purchasing a 3850 from Newegg until I saw how much the cpu holds it back so I just saved $80 buying a 2600pro instead.
    Reply
  • slapdashzero
    Excellent article. I love these "real world application" reads. I've got a garage full of older single core machines, and now I know that there are still useable things to be done with them.
    Reply
  • xx12amanxx
    Man i remember when my old 3000+ was considered fast..lol. But we already knew an older single core 64 would be a bottleneck.The real question is if a newer dual core will suffice? The computer i built for my mom has the older 3800+ dual in it and i paired it with a 7600gt. It played all games at that time great! She actually still uses it!
    Reply
  • You could overclock the 3850 card by using the bios and over clocking a cpu should of been no problem for you "old pros" I think you are not telling the whole story. AGP is alive and well and is good for most people..
    Reply
  • Preytor
    Nice to see such a great article done on AGP.
    AGP isn't dead yet. I still use a 7600GS 512MB on P4 @ 3.6Ghz, it's just fine for most games, and will play anything with the "right settings".
    Reply
  • Jakt
    Last week, I installed an AGP 2600xt in my Athlon 3000+ htpc, to replace an ATI 9600 AIW card that died. There was a very noticeable improvement in the picture quality on my television (Thanks, Avivo!), but there wasn't a large enough improvement in decoding HD to make it playable. I am still playing with the drivers to see if there is anything I can do to improve it, as theoretically it should be doable. The big problem that I have run into is that ATI has dumped support for this card on the AGP platform. I had specifically chosen ATI because it has superior support for dual monitors on an HTPC setup, but the lack of support is very discouraging.
    Reply
  • cleeve
    anonymous.You could overclock the 3850 card by using the bios and over clocking a cpu should of been no problem for you "old pros" I think you are not telling the whole story. AGP is alive and well and is good for most people.
    What part of the story are we not telling?
    Look at the system specs, we had to use 3 types of old DDR RAM to get to 2GB, some of it was very cheap - not even 400 MHz stuff. It doesn't matter how much of a pro I am, you can't squeeze more performance out by raising the CPU clock and lowering the memory clock into the basement to get it to work.

    I managed to scrounge up some better stuff for part 2, and it looks like we'll be using XP instead of Vista which will open up some videocard overclocking options. So hold on there sport, overclocking is on the way.
    Reply
  • cleeve
    anonymous.You could overclock the 3850 card by using the bios and over clocking a cpu should of been no problem for you "old pros" I think you are not telling the whole story. AGP is alive and well and is good for most people.
    What part of the story are we not telling?
    Look at the system specs, we had to use 3 types of old DDR RAM to get to 2GB, some of it was very cheap - not even 400 MHz stuff. It doesn't matter how much of a pro I am, you can't squeeze more performance out by raising the CPU clock and lowering the memory clock into the basement to get it to work.

    I managed to scrounge up some better stuff for part 2, and it looks like we'll be using XP instead of Vista which will open up some videocard overclocking options. So hold on there sport, overclocking is on the way.
    Reply
  • Great article

    shame that you ran the memory in single channel mode though.

    Reply
  • Mach5Motorsport
    Congrats to Tom's Hardware for again demonstrating that AGP is still a decent interface. I'm sure all the collective PCIe ubergeeks will be again shouting how AGP is dead..... ;) much to their dismay. AGP has now outlived PCIe standard 1.0!
    Reply