AGP not dead; runs high detail Crysis at 25 FPS

The time came to put this AGP card head to head with its PCI-E brother.

For that, we have Zombie Test Rig 3 (A shuttle box based on an Nforce 3 Ultra), and Dave’s Shuttle Box (based on an Nforce 4).

They’re essentially identical, but the Nforce 3 packs an AGP port, while the Nforce 4 is PCI-e. Both machines run an FX-60, 2GB of DDR-400, Windows XP SP2 and either a PCI-e or AGP HD 3850. There's only a 200MHz difference between Zombie rig 2's 4200+ and Zombie rig 3's FX-60, but the FX-60 was the most powerful processor we could drop into an AGP motherboard. So we did.

The results were uncanny. The AGP rig cruised in comfortably with 8509 3DMarks, while the PCI-E version only just beat it with a score of 8970 -- in other words, the performance drop for using an interface abandoned by the industry is roughly 5 percent-- that’s nothing a quick overclock wouldn’t fix.

It’s apparent that very little was sacrificed in the port to AGP. Granted, you don’t have the theoretical bandwidth of PCI-E 2.0, however saturating the 2.1 GB/s AGP bus is still quite a challenge. The biggest concern we can think of is that when you actually do upgrade, your shiny 3850 will still be waving you goodbye from the departure lounge.

Another concern is power. This thing can draw up to about 90W. If your PSU is currently straining with multitudes of hard drives, you may have trouble with the extra drain from the Radeon. We were pleasantly surprised, however, to find that our older 240W Shuttle PSU didn’t seem to notice, even with the load of an FX-60 CPU, two hard disks and a DVD burner -- so Sapphire may have taken this into consideration. Or the Shuttle PSU might be powered by miracles. The power connector is also a little odd: it uses a P8 connector rather than the more common P6. Fear not: a twin molex to P8 adaptor is included.

Not only do we love the speed of the HD 3850, we love how it operates. It’s very cool, very quiet and if your case is properly ventilated, the fan will never even turn on in day-to-day use. Coupled with its onboard hardware VC-1 and H.264 decoding (yay for HD DVD/Blu-ray), it’s a good match for that media centre you’ve been planning to build from your old rig.

Overall, the AGP 3850 is a solid card. Granted, finding old hardware powerful enough to push it to its full potential may be a bit of a battle, however for casual gamers with old PCs who are on a budget and desperate for more performance without a complete system overhaul, this card will hit the spot.

We reckon the whole concept is fantastic.