New AGP card..

Stallion

Diamond Member
May 4, 2000
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Ok, so I'm still in the dark ages but for now my PC still runs most everything at fairly good speeds. But I would like a new vid card before they are completely gone.

Right now I have a Leadtek A6600GT tdh 128mg card. I see Newegg has a BFG 7300GT 512 for $74 and PNY has a 7600GS 512mg for $84

MY chip is a Northwood 2.8 running at 3.05 with a gig of ram.

I haven't bought hardware for years but it seems like a decent way to get some more useage out of an old box.

I mostly just play CS:soursce but would like to try farcry.

Yeah or nay..
 

Stallion

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May 4, 2000
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Looks like a good deal. Are these better cards then the Nvidia series?

Also looks like it might be a PITA to get drivers loaded for it.
 

happy medium

Lifer
Jun 8, 2003
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Yes, if you MUST upgrade your agp system with a pent 4 based system for the price it's a nice card. Just use the drivers on the cd that it comes with.
 

Pederv

Golden Member
May 13, 2000
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Originally posted by: happy medium
get yourself a 3650 like this.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814161237

At least twice as fast then what you have now.

Or you can take your AGP card to the max and get a 3850.
I've already put one in a 3800X2 system and an XP2700 system and will put one in a 2800 Barton system.
To test the systems out I run:
3DMark2000
3DMark2001SE
3DMark03
3DMark05 and
3DMark06

The 3800X2 system showed increases across the board (upgraded from an ATI X800) with 3DMark03 scores more than doubling and 3DMark06 scores trippling.
I'm having some issues with the XP2700 system but running it as an XP2100, the improvement was simular to the 3800X2 system (just lower scores).

Toms has some charts

After I get all three systems up and running I planned on posting the results.
 

happy medium

Lifer
Jun 8, 2003
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A 3850 with a pent 4? Not worth the money in my opinion.
If his sytem has a nice psu and he can find a 3850 for 100 bucks mabe.

 

Pederv

Golden Member
May 13, 2000
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Originally posted by: happy medium
A 3850 with a pent 4? Not worth the money in my opinion.
If his sytem has a nice psu and he can find a 3850 for 100 bucks mabe.

Probably not, depends on how long the OP plans on keeping his system and where it goes when he upgrades.

My XP2700 and 2800 Barton are going to pre-teen nephews, so I'm making the systems all they can be. My daughter has the 3800X2 (939) so that system has had its last upgrade. Well maybe I'll take it up to 4GB RAM.
 

Stallion

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May 4, 2000
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Well it looks like that Powercolor 3850 is a pretty nice card. I have never ran a radeon card before. But it shows it running circles around a 6600GT.

Maybe that is the way to go...
 

Pederv

Golden Member
May 13, 2000
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If you would like to see the scores that I got when I upgraded my daughters system, I posted them over here in the CPU forum.
 

happy medium

Lifer
Jun 8, 2003
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Originally posted by: Stallion
Well it looks like that Powercolor 3850 is a pretty nice card. I have never ran a radeon card before. But it shows it running circles around a 6600GT.

Maybe that is the way to go...


The 3850 is the best agp card out there, but in your situation (counter strike and farcry) you dont need that much horsepower.
My pent4 @3.3 cpu bottlenecks my 7800gs in real games.
Games like Crysis, Call of duty 4 ,Bioshock, F.E.A.R, only run at 30/35 fps no matter how low I set the graphics at. What I'm trying to say is the pent 4 cpu just dosen't have the balls to run modern games with any video card.

You should really have a duel core cpu for a 3850 imho.

In real world performance. (games) a 3650 will be 4 times faster then your 6600gt for 80$

Because of your cpu the 3850 with only be 4.5 times faster for 130$.

Like I said for you it's not worth the money.



 

Stallion

Diamond Member
May 4, 2000
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So with the 3850 my prossesor would be holding me back huh... Well that is a concern... And I'm probably going to start new in a year or so. So maybe the 3650 is the better choice.
 

Pederv

Golden Member
May 13, 2000
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Granted these benchmarks are performed on a system where the video card is the bottleneck and these look to be PCI-E cards, but they give an idea of the difference in performance between the 3650 and the 3850.
 

happy medium

Lifer
Jun 8, 2003
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Originally posted by: Pederv
Granted these benchmarks are performed on a system where the video card is the bottleneck and these look to be PCI-E cards, but they give an idea of the difference in performance between the 3650 and the 3850.


Ok, but the only problem here is there testing at max detail with a high end quad cpu and 4 gigs of ram.

If they were using a pent 4 @ 3.0 and a 8800gtx you would still only net 20 fps.

I run Call of duty4 @ 32 fps at the absolute lowest detail possible.
When theres alot of action on the screen it goes lower.
If I turn the details up to med , the fps drops about 2 fps. So it's not the video card it's my pent 4 proccessor.
Now if I overclocked my cpu to say 3.8 I bet I could run it at 40 fps on med detail.

If you cant run a game at constant 30fps or more it 's not worth playing no matter what video card you have in there.