Gaming With AGP Graphics: Overclock That CPU!

Features
By Don Woligroski
published

Game Benchmarks: Crysis

Here's where we expect things to get interesting. Will the overclocked CPU unleash more performance or will Crysis be too bottlenecked by the graphics subsystem to show any gains?

There's a lot of data to sift through here, but the most obvious conclusion is that the Athlon X2 3800+ severely bottlenecked the AGP Radeon HD 3850. However, the CPU change doesn't seem to have much of an effect on the Radeon HD 4650 cards. Apparently, Crysis was already choking these graphics cards, even with the Athlon X2 3800+. Let's see if upping the physics detail has any effect:

If you look at the previous results, you can see that upping the physics detail has almost no effect on the simulated Athlon X2 5000+ CPU. Compare this to the Athlon X2 3800+ CPU, which definitely took a frame rate hit when physics detail was increased. This indicates that the higher-clocked CPU is shifting the bottleneck back to the graphics cards.

Also, as the resolution is raised, the bottleneck quickly moves to the graphics card. This means that the gains from the faster CPU had the greatest impact at 1280x1024. Having said that, the AGP Radeon HD 3850 was able to leverage its higher graphics performance across the whole spectrum of resolutions. 

Don Woligroski
117 Comments Comment from the forums
  • megamanx00
    Yeah, playing Crysis on low aint too fun :D. Still a 3850 with a 2.6GHz X2 is enough for mostly medium details at like 1024x768 or 1280x1024. Anyway yeah getting anything more than a 2600XT for an old AGP system requires an overclocked dual core. Would have been nice to see some numbers from an overclocked dual core P4, since there are a few of those on AGP out there, but I'm sure the results would have been pretty pretty sad ^_^.
    Reply
  • masterjaw
    This is a memorabilia on how AGP-based systems struggle to perform well with recent games. Still, an overall upgrade would still be way better than buying one of these old timers and try to suspend the inescapable destruction.
    Reply
  • jamesedgeuk2000
    "Still, an overall upgrade would still be way better than buying one of these old timers and try to suspend the inescapable destruction."

    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?
    Reply
  • manjyomethunder
    jamesedgeuk2000"Still, an overall upgrade would still be way better than buying one of these old timers and try to suspend the inescapable destruction."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.
    Reply
  • amdfangirl
    Interesting daughter board... sure it might not bottleneck tho?
    Reply
  • masterjaw
    jamesedgeuk2000Yes 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?
    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.
    Reply
  • marcos669
    Well, this is better tomshardware, but isn´t still enough, put the AGP cards in an Asrock AliveDual-esata2 or the AM2NF3-VSTA,with athlon 5xxx or 7xxx and DDR2-800 memory, and you will see 3850 AGP can be much more competitive and Crysis can be Played in High settings.

    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.
    Reply
  • rickzor
    Aww this is my motherboard! Although i dont use the daughterboard but instead a use the pci-e on the motherboard (yes it comes with both, pci-e and agp) with a gf9600gt, and a powerful athlon 64 3500+ overclocked to 2.5ghz.
    It's my main computer.
    Reply
  • rickzor
    Aww this is my motherboard! Although i dont use the daughterboard but instead a use the pci-e on the motherboard (yes it comes with both, pci-e and agp) with a gf9600gt, and a powerful athlon 64 3500+ overclocked to 2.5ghz.
    It's my main computer.
    Reply
  • rickzor
    doublepost.
    Reply