Radeon 3850 AGP Plus Single-Core CPU

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This is the best article I have read lately! Great, this is what THG used to be like 🙂
I just want to add that I have (although on a PCI-E platform) changed from a single core 3500+ to a 5000+ (which is 2.6 GHz dual core) and APART from the games that utelize multicore there is really no advantage. For my normal avi-watching, websurfing, virusscanning tinkering the singlecore was just as good if not slightly faster. I'm shure this will change when software is more multithreaded in a few years but for you ppl in single cores thats not gaming heavy, be cool 🙂
 
I must add for your AGP platforms a lot of us out here have dual socket opteron and like me dual socket xeon processors. I run an Intel SE7505VB2 with 2 xeon 3.2 with 1MB L3 and and ATI HD 2600 XT 512MB. UT3 Demo is quite playable with no stutters or lock ups at max on all video.

So just as thought for your testing of AGP add some dual Xeon and opteron to the mix.

Duane
 
I just downloaded 3dmark06 and pulled 4388 and 4187 I guess that is ok on a 5 year old system??

Intel Se7505VB2 with 2 3.2 GHz xeon 533 FSB 512Kb L2 1 MB L3, 4GB DDR HD2600XT 512 SCSI 160 RAID 5 SATA 1.5 RAID 5
 
i have 3.4ghz P4 Extreme, 7600gs 512mb, 1gb low latency ram on a P4P800. like others have mentioned, this setup still runs games fine. the exception being the very newest games, which (like the article states) are much more CPU dependent.

I was able to play Crysis (all low) @ about 24-30fps right up to the space ship, where it dropped to an unplayable 10-14fps. this seems to be true for many of the other games i have tried, many seem to max out at 30-40fps, even if uncapped. i surprises me that my slow 7600gs would perform so well, with the CPU beating it to the bottleneck.

another thing i noticed while upgrading my rig over time, was that the high performance/low latency RAM seemed to help alot. i actually had 2gb of a 'frankenstein' mix, but when i took the 2x512mb sticks out and left the 1gb alone my FPS increased drastically (in older games at least) just an idea for my fellow AGPers...
 
AGP is far from DEAD!!!

My AGP rig was built to be the best in mind, at the end of the aging AGP line.

Do you really believe double the bandwith (x16), is actually than much better than (x8)... lets leave it to the marketing gimmicks!!!

The Rig:
Intel Core2Duo E2140 2.13Ghz (O.C. 2.40Ghz)
Zalman CNPS9500A LED
Coolermaster eXtreme Power 650W PSU
AsRock 775i65G (O.C. 1066FSB)
Kingston DDR1-400 2GB 2.5CL (O.C. 2.0CL) (Rear Version! 😛)
PowerColor HD2600Pro (O.C. 10% via bios tweak)
WD Raptor 10K-RPM 75GB
Sounblaster X-Fi Xtreme Gamer (64Mb)

This rig is more than sweet for gaming & 1080p HD playback (x264) and all fits in a Sony m-ATX case (part of my Sony Media Center Setup).

As long as there is an upgrade possible, I will countiue to do so...

Well... someone has to!! ;D ;D

Next upgrade to the rig is:

Core 2 Duo E6750 2.66GHz (will be O.C. of course)
Pioneer BDC-202 Blu-Ray
Shappire 3850 AGP (Zalman ZF900-Cu LED cooler, also better driver support than Powercolor)

AGP IS LIVE AND KILLING IN FPS... TRUST THIS AGP GAMER!!!

P.S. Crysis says what... WHAT?!?
 
Did you consider testing the card on a dothan system? There are many guys out there with an Asus motherboard, the CT-479 (also from Asus) and a Dothan overclocked up to 2.6+ GHz, which really rocks!
 
excellent article indeed....i would like to see how the card scale with x2 3800+ on 393 socket and a pentium D 2.8 or 3Ghz.....my friend is planning to get 3850 but is wondering if he would be better off getting a new cpu instead
 
First things first. I have reservations about using vista as a test platform for single core CPU's. It is by far the least representative OS for older machines.

Also, why try and run crysis on med-low, surely LOW on everything (especially shadows, as this always drains CPU from older machines) is where you would start with if you were actually a gamer with this rig, FPS under 25 and you drop the settings regardless of visuals.

AGP is still alive, you could have gotten good framerates on most of these games by dropping settings further. Win XP is the platform of choice virtually EVERYWHERE for gamer enthusiasts on a budget, or in fact mostly everyone, vista is a flop.
 
Thank god i went with an expensive mainboard when i purcased my 939-3000+ ( now 939-3500+ running 2,53Ghz ).
started with 6600GT and passed on to X800XL
currently using a 8800GT and man what a boost from X800XL.
 
Hmm... is it actually possible to upgrade Socket 775 systems to dual core processors? I thought only a very few of the earliest (single core) Athlon64's were released on 775 before everything moved to 939.
 
I'll start worrying if my rig can play a game when the game is worth it. I made the mistake of shelling out £400 for a GeForce 6800 Ultra purely for Doom 3. It did make Half Life 2 and Homeworld 2 fly though so it's not all bad.

Maybe if Crysis was worth playing I'd fret, until then my 5-year old 3.2GHz Prescott with that 6800 Ultra runs my games of choice (i.e. Source-based games) perfectly fine on the highest settings.
 
I think Vista is reeking havok on the 6600GT tests. Consider using W2K, rather than XP or Vista, as many "new" games will run on W2K with proper tweaks. These include FEAR, GRAW2, COD4, CRYSIS, etc. Also, try using higher performance graphics drivers - such as Xtreme G (www.tweakforce.com). I continue to enjoy my 6600GT from Palit. Here's the benches..3DMark05/3DMark06 at 3879/1975

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=4114073

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=6711562

Your 6600 GT can do so much more than you are seeing.

Regards,
jtleon
 
even with a bad memory combo you can still overclock

set the memory from ddr400 to ddr333

increase the FSB until the memory reaches it's stock speed

then after that, reduce the multiplier by .5

increase the FSB further (this will allow for a good overclock and a high overclock on the bus with out stressing the memory )

i have a opteron 170 PC and a geforce 6800 agp (overclocked and unlocked) and it runs crysis with most settings on medium and some on low with a good 22-25 FPS at 1440x900 resolution

i have been building pc's for people for years and many of them wanted their pc to be overclocked (since they wanted as much performance as possible from a pc that was as low cost a possible

so i know how cheap memory can hate overclock, most of them wouldn't take more than a 8MHz overclock

thats why playing with the dividers and multipliers and fsb was needed.

 
forgot to add, why are you running vista on that system

vista by it's self deals a major performance decrease compared to xp even on current high end computers

it has 4 times as many running processes and is very inefficient. the requirements increase don't add up to what they added to the OS

http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/183/windowscpujt2.jpg
http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/5600/windowshddn3.jpg
http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/172/windowsmemorytr4.jpg

requirements graph

redo the tests on windows xp. use rivatuner also and you will be able to overclock the videocard also
dl link for rivatuner http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=163
 
[citation][nom]americanbrian[/nom]First things first. I have reservations about using vista as a test platform for single core CPU's. It is by far the least representative OS for older machines.
...Win XP is the platform of choice virtually EVERYWHERE for gamer enthusiasts on a budget, or in fact mostly everyone, vista is a flop.[/citation]

I agree. But I'm a big fan of testing in the 'worst case scenario'; I think knowing the worst possible performance from a setup is much more useful than knowing it can kick out 60 fps in Crysis if you're using Windows XP and low settings.

This is an AGP Radeon 3850, we need to see if it can produce the same performance as we expect from a PCIe 3850 on a newer machine; low settings and XP aren't going to show us that in a satisfactory manner. As well, if I didn't test to see if this DirectX 10 card could actually run DirectX 10 in Vista, I'd have gotten my head bitten off by you guys.

The point is proven now though, and in part 2 we'll be using XP - mostly because the Asrock 939dual-SATA2 motherboard won't let us use the AGP 3850 in conjunction with a dual-core CPU.
 
Thanks Cleeve for doing the analysis for this card! To my knowledge, Tom's may be the only tech site to do such a study, which even so, would probably not have happened without your conscientious willingness to enlighten AGP users.

I look foward to Part II.
 
great article. I have a 2600 pro on a 2.8e HT prescott. The ddr2 is exactly correct after ramsinking the system memory (was recommended 4 years ago upon this cpus release anyway). No regrets at all. Also, there is an error with toms testing... my cpu is really at 10% watching the big movies. anything over 30% (as I remember ati tech support about this years ago) is an error in decoding with vid card. Be sure to have an os acceptable driver, windows is a real bitch about that...and will even ignore capabilities. Also, lastly, avivo encoding wasn't mentioned.. you wanna see incredibly fast encoding? try avivo. Holy cow. It is the fastest on Earth. And lastly, for real, get a better vid card cooler. Oem sucks, I would have failed miserably sooner than later with it. passive accelero is the icing on the cake for this, my last agp...and the 2.8e will never be a bottle neck ..shamefully in a way to say...
 
We were using HD- DVD movies, not DVD. Without video card hardware acceleration, a slower CPU like the 3500+ WILL DEFINITELY be running at 100% to play back 1920x1080p video. A video card like the 3850 with decode acceleration will lower that to 90% as it did in this review. It was no error.

If it was a newer, fast core 2 CPU, CPU utilization would have been much lower, but still significant.

The avivo encoder is software, it doesn't tie in to the hardware so the video card doesn't really matter. Purchasing any new radeon will give you access to the encoding software.

The cooler on the 3850 IS aftermarket, not OEM. Darn good cooler, too.
 
Great article Tom......it comes at a very odd time for myself. A couple specs on my computer: Athlon 3000+ 6600gt (pci exp) 120gb WD HDD my 74GB Raptor failed after a power outage. I have recently hit the limit of my HDD therefore I have been searching around for a new one. The HDD charts are somewhat overdue for an update so my search led me to AnandTech. I found a fairly well put together article on the 640gb WD 2 platter. So as you can see I have begun straying, I have been a loyal reader for around 7 years now, I have read nearly every article. I have been thinking about making my PC an HTPC and buying a mac book for school. (I have never owned a mac and have always been very anti-apple but after using them recently, I have to say I was quite amazed by their product) The graphics option I have decided on is the 8800gt and my only question was how it would perform with the 3000+ or if i should upgrade to the best the 939 socket has to offer? So to sum up you have defiantly won myself back to being a loyal reader. I can not wait for the second installment and if you so find fit, throw a 8800gt PCI into the mix. ;p Keep them coming Tom! Don't be afraid to explore modding the exotic sexuality that happens to come in a sleek white design.
 
Yay, good article, thank you!
[citation][nom]cleeve[/nom]...it looks like we'll be using XP instead of Vista...[/citation]
Does that mean you had compatibility issues with Vista? Would it be possible to tell us what the situation with drivers is? Just telling us if you can install the AGP HD 3850 and run games on XP/Vista 32/Vista 64 would be sufficient, but ideally could you test it the same way that you did for part one of the review. Buying a DX10 card to run on XP seems a bit silly to me, and I've been running Vista on my system (X2 3600+@2.2GHz, 2GB PC3200, X800XTPE) for over 18 months, no trouble. So yeah, please could you tell us about compatibility with the 64-bit version of Vista because there seems to be a lot of people out there having trouble with it and the drivers for this card.
Thank you
ch424
 
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