The ultimate AGP video card today?

[rcraig]

Tom's has posted the first part of an article about the AGP version of the 3850:Radeon 3850 AGP Plus Single-Core CPU . The next part will be testing a dual core cpu. It is interesting that the AGP bus isn't as big of a bottleneck as most would believe. I'm really waiting to see how the dual core cpu does because that is what I have.

I loaded Crysis last night. The auto-detect said I should run on medium settings at 1024x768. I played for an hour and didn't notice any problems. Tonight I may try upping the settings. If I see any problems, I will try turning down the physics setting like they did in the Tom's article.

 

[Skunkwourk]

thanks for posting that, damn doesn't look like its worth upgrading for me.

 

[RKDxpress]

Hi! Been reading this post for a month now. So I got a Sapphire 3850 512 MB card from newegg about a week ago. Here are my thoughts! Card Rocks! went from a BFG 6800 ultra oc to this 3850 agp, Futuremark 03 and 06 bench marks doubled! Games look fantastic! Able to run all my games on High settings with the Card set to High quality. This includes Crysis which still stutters once and a great while but I barly was able to run it at all on low settings with the 6800 which stuttered and froze up all the time. Bioshock, UT3, and every other game I've tried out run great. Do'nt know fps but don't care. If you plan to keep your old agp computer for a while longer I recomend this card and running 2 gb of memory too keep it going! My Sys: Intel P4 3.2 cpu, Gigabyte Ga-8knxp board with 875 chipset, 2gb of OCZ pc3200, 2 80gb sata HD, Audigy 2 sound card, 650 watt psu, and Sapphire3850 8x agp, running 8.4 drivers. (used hotfix drivers then CCC.) Oh yeah XP 32 bit.

 

[Skunkwourk]

Originally posted by: RKDxpress
Hi! Been reading this post for a month now. So I got a Sapphire 3850 512 MB card from newegg about a week ago. Here are my thoughts! Card Rocks! went from a BFG 6800 ultra oc to this 3850 agp, Futuremark 03 and 06 bench marks doubled! Games look fantastic! Able to run all my games on High settings with the Card set to High quality. This includes Crysis which still stutters once and a great while but I barly was able to run it at all on low settings with the 6800 which stuttered and froze up all the time. Bioshock, UT3, and every other game I've tried out run great. Do'nt know fps but don't care. If you plan to keep your old agp computer for a while longer I recomend this card and running 2 gb of memory too keep it going! My Sys: Intel P4 3.2 cpu, Gigabyte Ga-8knxp board with 875 chipset, 2gb of OCZ pc3200, 2 80gb sata HD, Audigy 2 sound card, 650 watt psu, and Sapphire3850 8x agp, running 8.4 drivers. (used hotfix drivers then CCC.) Oh yeah XP 32 bit.

First, welcome to the forums, second, when you say you play all games on high quality, that includes Crysis? I do plan to keep this rig around for a couple more years but after the Tom's article I figure my cpu might be done for newer multi threaded games, and with my x1950pro I might already be playing close to what my rig is capable of.

 

[evolucion8]

Originally posted by: rcraig
Tom's has posted the first part of an article about the AGP version of the 3850:Radeon 3850 AGP Plus Single-Core CPU . The next part will be testing a dual core cpu. It is interesting that the AGP bus isn't as big of a bottleneck as most would believe. I'm really waiting to see how the dual core cpu does because that is what I have.

I loaded Crysis last night. The auto-detect said I should run on medium settings at 1024x768. I played for an hour and didn't notice any problems. Tonight I may try upping the settings. If I see any problems, I will try turning down the physics setting like they did in the Tom's article.

That article has a blurry vision of benchmarking, how will you use two mixed memory brands which performance and timing differences can impair performance? How did they stated that only Sapphire and Powercolor are the ones that are releasing the HD 3850 when HIS and Club3D also released the HD 3850 on AGP? They stated that the Overdrive feature doesn't work on Vista, and currently it works perfectly on mine, how that could be possible?

 

[rcraig]

Originally posted by: m0mentary
First, welcome to the forums, second, when you say you play all games on high quality, that includes Crysis? I do plan to keep this rig around for a couple more years but after the Tom's article I figure my cpu might be done for newer multi threaded games, and with my x1950pro I might already be playing close to what my rig is capable of.

I tried running Crysis on High at 1280x1024 and there were some stutters, so I dropped it back to 1024x768 on High. I haven't had a big firefight yet, but in normal game play everything is running smoothly. All other games I have tried ran fine on the highest settings.

RCraig

 

[RKDxpress]

Sorry for not getting right back to yas. Momentary I tried playing Crysis again last night and was in a big shoot out and had a lot of stuttering. 90 degrees farinhight here and the card was running about 62 degress celsius so that may have been part of it. My settings were on 1360 x 760 of the four settings (low medium high and highest) set to high antoscropic off. Turned it down to 1024x760 and shadows to medium to keep playing. My previous point was I could play on high with the 3850 and could not even view it with the 6800. As far reaching bottle necks now or in future games there is really nothing you can do except build another high end computer. I'm happy with the card and performance boost it gave. Just for fun I put the 6800 in a old pentium 3 computer and it made little diffrence over a Ti4200 I took out. At some point we'll have to give up on our old rigs I'm good for now. RKD

 

[rcraig]

For those interested, ZipZoomFly has the HIS H385F512ANP Radeon HD 3850 512MB GDDR3 AGP 2/4/8x Video Card Retail on sale for $110 after MIR.

I finished Crysis last night. The last half of the game I ran in developer mode which shows frame rates. Most of the time mine was running between 30-40 fps, with a few drops in the 20's, but still very playable.