Gigabyte's Radeon HD 4650: Are AGP Graphics Still Good Enough?

[itrendslave]

The AGP HD 2XXX, 3XXX, and 4XXX series have never been supported by the official Catalyst drivers. You have to get the "Catalyst AGP Hotfix drivers" for these cards (although I haven't seen any official mention of support for the 4XXX series). They keep the AGP Hotfix drivers current with each release of Catalyst. I think a lot of people, including me, would be interested to see if these hotfix drivers support the 4XXX series and/or change the performance with all or any of the cards (with the faster CPU in part 2).

Here's the link:
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/CatalystAGPHotfix.aspx

 

[itrendslave]

In addition to my above comment... the "Last Updated" date on the hotfix driver page (which currently reads 4/8/2009) is incorrect. Don't let it discourage you about the driver being current.

 

[bpdski]

Here's my vote for adding a 4670 in part 2! I also would have preferred to see an X800 instead of an X700 which really wasn't a great card even in it's day.

 

[nafhan]

Another reason the PCIe card might be faster could be a PCIe to AGP bridge chip rather than the bus itself. I would think the 4xxx series cards are all native PCIe. I vaguely remember similar issues (but the other way around) with early nVidia PCIe GPU's. The native AGP cards were slightly slower on PCIe because they had to go through a bridge chip.

Also, a cheap CPU with a high-end graphics card is STILL enough to get high framerates in every game available. You can get a 2.8Ghz Regor for $60, which will be faster than any chip you could buy 4 years ago...

 

[mapesdhs]

I must confess I'm surprised such a low CPU was used for this article,
given how cheap it is now to obtain a very nice CPU for any older system,
eg. AM2 Athlon64 X2 7850 BlackEdition 2.8GHz 3MB L2, just 44 UKP here:

http://www.lambda-tek.com/componentshop/index.pl?prodID=B229754

and probably overclockable to 3GHz+ with ease (my 6000+ 3GHz runs fine
at 3.25GHz). Plenty of And 2nd-hand bargains available aswell, eg. I
recently bought a 6000+ for 45 UKP.

Even more amazing, makers like Asrock are fully supporting all the
new AthlonII and Phenon/Phenom2 CPUs on older AGP motherboards (ie. BIOS
updates), eg. my old AGP board only cost 35 UKP (ran very well) but it
can use good Phenom2 quad-cores:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/cpu.asp?Model=AM2NF3-VSTA&s=AM2

With a lowly 3800+ there are bound to be CPU bottlenecks in many games.
These tests really need to be redone with a better CPU to be useful,
since anyone considering a gfx upgrade of this kind is bound to also
want a CPU upgrade. People know now that it makes sense to pair a strong
gfx card with a good CPU, given the oodles of advice available on forum
discussions, main articles, etc. At the very least show some results
with a 2.8GHz dual-core, and yes overclocking matters too. My brother's
system is an Athlon64 3400+ 2.4GHz, but it oc'd perfectly to a surprising
2.76GHz so he's able to play Stalker just fine (X1950Pro AGP). I expect
the various X2 options below 3GHz can also oc quite well.

Ian.

 

[mapesdhs]

And btw, why no X1950Pro AGP included in the article? I suspect those with
older AGP systems are much more likely to be using this model than the
3850. The X1950 also oc'd very well indeed, eg. mine went from 580 to 641.

Ian.

 

[megamanx00]

Poor socket 939 owners. Well, at least that old 3800 would be a little more respectable if overclocked. Still, there are reasons to upgrade an older machine such as having a spare at a lan party, hey if your buddy gets fraged by lag or low FPS he should buy and bring his own, or to play older games. My athlon 3000 is pretty much for playing older games that don't like Vista or don't support a widescreen resolution. Of course I already have a 1950GT in there so there's no point in getting anything faster with that old CPU .

 

[decept]

As far as I know the 4650 is far superior to the 3850 in terms of video quality (for movies) and offload a lot of processing from the cpu. I have a 4650 pcie and when I play a high quality 1080p mkv my cpu is almost idle.

 

[pakardbell486dx2]

how come tom's always uses AMD for legacy tests? How about benchmarks using a P4 socket 478.
Say Pentium 4HT @3.4ghz on 875p Board??
Please???

 

[matt_b]

Where is the PCIe version of the 3850? Having two comparisons of equal technology (since this is AGP versus PCIe), that it would be more of a complete test to actually have two identical cards of each bus interface instead of just one. This way we could see an actual trend of any kind. On another note, why do we have a 1gb card in this bunch when the others are 512 (could care less about the x700, it is nice for a reference of circa 2005 tech though)? If you guys are going to do comparisons, I am tired of you guys grabbing a hold of whatever you can find laying around. Things need to be like and like and not close enough. Everyone knows hat happens to frame rates when you up the memory on the card and put it through it's paces - it does better than the card with less. In this case, how can I look at what you guys scored with between the 4650 AGP with 1 gig of memory and the 4650 with 512 and deduct that any performance differences are purely the bus technology???

 

[KyleSTL]

You people obviously don't understand cleeve's methods for reviewing equipment. He makes them as real-world as possible, and that is especially usefully in this case where best-case-scenario would be meaningless (i.e. a person thinking of investing in an AGP version of this GPU is not going to have a top-of-the-line AGP board and modern CPU). This is a video card that would go into an aging system as a last ditch effort to not build a new system. Likely a person isn't going to own a rig that's best-case-scenario, but a common system of yesteryear.

 

[chechak]

come on guys it's gaan be 2010 and there is some one stuck with AGP card ....get money and buy new system .....

 

[esquire468]

[citation][nom]mapesdhs[/nom]I must confess I'm surprised such a low CPU was used for this article,given how cheap it is now to obtain a very nice CPU for any older system,eg. AM2 Athlon64 X2 7850 BlackEdition 2.8GHz 3MB L2, just 44 UKP here:http://www.lambda-tek.com/componen [...] ID=B229754[/citation]

The problem is that is not a Socket 939. If they were using socket AM2, you could upgrade the mobo cheap to a PCIe board. Dual core socket 939s are expensive, if you can find them other than used on ebay.

 

[mapesdhs]

KyleSTL, the thing is, anyone contemplating buying a card like this, who has an
older CPU like a 3000+, is bound to also consider getting a better CPU at the same
time, especially as I said before because of how cheap good CPUs like the 7850 are
now, along with 2nd-hand bargains like the 6000+ (45 UKP seems to be an average
price for this model in the UK). All this article shows is how the 4650 does over
an older X700 in a config where the CPU hasn't been upgraded to match. Plus, the
X1950 would have been a more useful base comparison anyway, given how well it sold
at the time (excellent price/performance reported in reviews). So we have some data
points with the results as they are, but the picture is incomplete without the same
tests done with a better CPU (not enough data atm to make an informed decision),
something which should have been obvious from the start, and if toms really want to
cover all the bases then why not show how the card performs when all possibility of
a CPU bottleneck is removed to whatever extent is achievable?

Consider the older AGP board I have, it can use a Phenom2 X4 3.2GHz - how
would that change the results when fitted with a 4650? ie. despite the advantages
of PCIe, some people would rather just upgrade their existing system. What's the
best CPU an AGP board can take? It varies of course, but users of AGP boards really
need something much better than a 3000+ paired with the 4650 in site tests to gain
any useful insight from the results.

If I'm reading Asrock's site correctly, the best possible Athlon64 X2 officially
supported on toms' board is the 2.6GHz 5200+ which could then be oc'd to 2.8 or
more. Or there's the FX 2.8Hz. But no wonder toms' 5600+ didn't work, it's not
supported by the BIOS for this board, something they could have easily checked
beforehand.

As for PCIe vs. AGP: I obtained better 3DMark results with my cheap Asrock board
and an X1950Pro AGP than hardware review sites were getting with the PCIe X1950!
I don't think the limits of the AGP bus were really reached until the 3850.

Perhaps my system summaries can be useful to people? They show how performance
changed with the same CPU (6000+) when moving from an AGP/X1950Pro to PCIe/8800GT:

OLD: http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/mysystemsummary.txt
NEW: http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/mysystemsummary2.txt


Btw, many of these issues were covered in toms' AGP Platform Analysis in Feb/2007.

Ian.

 

[ssalim]

IMO, the price of AGP vid.cards are not worth it anymore. It's like paying $40-$50 for 120GB hard drive where with $50-$70 you could get 500GB.

 

[caamsa]

The 5600+ AM2 cpu should work fine with the expansion card in that MB. I have one running in my wife's computer with the exact same mb. I am positive that cpu will give it a good boost. I found the expansion slot to be particular with the type of ram that you use in it.

 

[False_Dmitry_II]

Wait, one of the reasons to shift to PCIe was to give more power to the cards? Why does my graphics card have this power plug on it then?

 

[caamsa]

The mother board they are using has a pci-e and a full speed AGP slot......AND an expansion slot where you can add a AM2 cpu and ddr2 memory.

 

[mapesdhs]

caamsa, I was just going by the CPUs listed on the Asrock web site. Good news if
it does indeed work, though I wonder why Asrock hasn't listed it?

ssalim, you're right that beyond a certain point it makes more sense to switch to
a new setup, but that's why the 2nd-hand market is so useful, and not everyone can
or wants to do that big a switch all in one go. I started off with a Dell Precision
650, buying the X1950 Pro shortly after it was released (my system had other items
like SCSI disks, etc.) 6 months later I switched to a home-built 6000+ system with
new DDR2 RAM but kept the X1950, disks, DVDRW, etc. Later, I switched again to a
PCIe mbd with an 8800GT, but kept the 6000+, RAM, disks, etc. I expect a lot of
people evolve their systems in this way. Thus, as an example, anyone who did have
toms' Dual939-SATA2 board with a 3000+ and a decent gfx card could gain access to
a much better CPU upgrade path simply by switching to the AM2NF3-VSTA board I had
(costs around 20 UKP) or some other later AGP board. Yes, they'd have to replace
the RAM, but DDR2/800 costs zilch these days (I just bought a 2GB kit for 25 UKP)
and this is cheaper than the CPU expansion module for the old board which doesn't
have that great a range of supported CPUs anyway.

At what point it makes more sense to completely switch to something new depends on
many things, not the least of which is one's budget. I was lucky, my PCIi mbd and
8800GT were last year's main bday presents. 8)

Ian.

 

[caamsa]

I ran an AM2 6000+ Windsor in it as well. It worked but the bios did not recognize the processor. It did recognize the 5600+. I still have my 6000+ and run it in my main machine with an ATI 4850.

I started with one of the dual vsta boards and got the sata2 board later. I had 2 of them.....one finally died. The Dual vsta had a single core 3200+ then went to a 3800+ X2. Then I got the expansion card and got a AM2 4600+ and then went to the AM2 5600+. I also went through various AGP cards. Started with a 6800 vanilla, then a X800GTO, then finally got a 7950GT pci-e card. My wife still has the board with the AM2 5600+ and a 9600GT.

I certainly saved a lot of money upgrading with that board.

 

[brown63]

Its a shame they didn't give the AGP 4650 more oomph than the AGP 3850, then it might have proved to be a viabl upgrade for aged ADP users.
I have an AMD 37000+(754), 2GB DDR-400 and 7800GS and it plays Stalker: CS competently, albeit at low settings. The only game of late that I am interested in is Fallout 3, so there is no need to upgrade when there are many games in my arsenal that are unfinished. XP loads pretty fast too. It doesn't touch the internet so no issues there.

 

[mapesdhs]

brown63, what clock is your 3700+ running at? I don't know about the 7800GS, but I
do know that a 2.76GHz 3400+ 754 with an X1950Pro plays Stalker just fine at fairly
high settings (my brother's machine; it has 2GB DDR400 aswell, with a 146GB 15K
U320 SCSI disk so it's pretty nippy for general use). I used the Thermalright XP90
cooler in order to get the good oc on the CPU, though during the warmer months the
speed is lowered to 2.64. This is on a K8Upgrade-1689 board. Oddly enough, in theory
he could make use of a CPU expansion board aswell, but alas the cost of the
expansion board is more than just switching to a different board and buying new
RAM (the only supplier I found was in New Zealaned).

That's the problem with boards that offered future CPU support via an expansion
board - sometimes it's hard to find the board, or if it's available then often the
price is too high.

Ian.

 

[brown63]

mapesdhs, my CPU is a 2.4GHZ, with the DVD and HD still IDE. I guess in the not too distant future I will upgrade, but my home theatre is getting the $$ at the mo.

 

[mapesdhs]

Hmm, I guess my bro was lucky to get a CPU which was already 2.4GHz. I basially
swapped an old GF4 MX440 card for the mbd/CPU bundle with a guy who wanted the GF
card for a Linux system.

One thing I've noticed is that online stores which still sell older CPUs are now
often charging huge amounts for them.

Ian.

 

[VChuck]

Yeah it's real nice ATI still catering to people with legacy agp and all ,would have been nice to see how how well it would do with a single core P-4 3.4 (yeah I'm stuck with 4 of em)for H.254/VC-1/Blue ray for turning it into a dedicated HTPC/Mythubuntu maybe.I have a C2D/and Q6600 system,but I want to use my old Gallatin and Prescott for movies and TV
Cleeve, can you incorporate some tests in "part 2"of your review?