VOGONS


First post, by appiah4

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In 2005 I went straight from Socket A straight to Socket AM2 so I missed 754/940, and 939; in time I want to build systems for each of them. The first of these will be a Socket 754 PC. I'm building it with a Sempron64 3000+ as it's all I have for this socket currently but I will upgrade it to an Athlon64 3200+ or 3400+ as soon as I find one for cheap. My problem is choosing an AGP card for this build. What I have are:

Radeon 9800 (Non-Pro)
Radeon X1950PRO
Radeon HD3850
Radeon HD4650

Target is games from 2000-2003, maybe a bit of 2004. I'd rather stick to ATI hardware for this period, and ideally would have used an X800/X850 AGP, but I don't have one. Would the X1950PRO be too fast or too modern for this build? And if I am going a bit beyond the contemporary for this socket, should I just go crazy with it and go for HD3850 or HD 4650?

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 2 of 11, by shamino

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HD3850 and 4650 have H.264 acceleration features which an Athlon64 benefits from (they struggle with many HD videos otherwise). But then there's the ins and outs of getting that feature to work.
If you don't care about that, then the X1950 is probably ample for games in the range you mentioned, but I'm not experienced with these cards. It certainly doesn't seem too new to me.

I've usually had cards that are newer than the CPU they are used with, so those are the combos that feel natural to me. When I find out what cards are actually considered "correct" for a CPU, I'm usually surprised. I don't like holding back a system by using a card that has the same date as the CPU.
Late AGP cards were marketed as upgrades for the last AGP machines, so I think an Athlon64 is a very realistic system to use any of them. But if you're also building a socket-939, perhaps the 3850/4650 are better matched to that.

Reply 3 of 11, by watson

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shamino wrote:

But if you're also building a socket-939, perhaps the 3850/4650 are better matched to that.

Yes, I think all the cards except the 9800 would be bottlenecked by any Socket 754 CPU, but you probably already know that.

In my experience, the HD4650 AGP sucks if you have a DDR2 version because it's heavily constrained by memory bandwidth.
According to a short Google search, there is indeed a HIS 1GB DDR3 version, but Sapphire and Gigabyte used DDR2 (I have the Sapphire).
Just to illustrate, the X1950 Pro has 44.16 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The 4650 DDR2 has 12.8 GB/s. I seriously don't know who thought this was a good idea.

The HD 3850 is obvious overkill, so I would probably go with the X1950 Pro as well.
Better not disturb the 9800 too much, I don't really trust their long term reliability (it's definitely better than the 9700 and 9700 Pro, but still)...

Reply 4 of 11, by nforce4max

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Of all of them the X1950 Pro is the best card for the money as everything else is often expensive and condition can be an issue with these other cards as well. The 9800 series are nice cards as well the X8x0s but they run hot so keep that in mind.

On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.

Reply 5 of 11, by appiah4

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watson wrote:
Yes, I think all the cards except the 9800 would be bottlenecked by any Socket 754 CPU, but you probably already know that. […]
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shamino wrote:

But if you're also building a socket-939, perhaps the 3850/4650 are better matched to that.

Yes, I think all the cards except the 9800 would be bottlenecked by any Socket 754 CPU, but you probably already know that.

In my experience, the HD4650 AGP sucks if you have a DDR2 version because it's heavily constrained by memory bandwidth.
According to a short Google search, there is indeed a HIS 1GB DDR3 version, but Sapphire and Gigabyte used DDR2 (I have the Sapphire).
Just to illustrate, the X1950 Pro has 44.16 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The 4650 DDR2 has 12.8 GB/s. I seriously don't know who thought this was a good idea.

The HD 3850 is obvious overkill, so I would probably go with the X1950 Pro as well.
Better not disturb the 9800 too much, I don't really trust their long term reliability (it's definitely better than the 9700 and 9700 Pro, but still)...

The 4650 I have is a Sapphire card as well:

Sapphire_Radeon_HD4650_AGP.jpg

It seems to be a DDR2 version. I'm not sure how big a deal the memory bandwidth difference is as the AGP bus would probably be the bottleneck for transferring textures anyway? Also, the memory size of 1Gb probably makes life a lot easier for games beyond 2004. Regardless, the X1950 is what I will be going with:

Sapphire_Radeon_X1950_PRO_AGP.jpg

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 6 of 11, by KCompRoom2000

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Good choice, the Radeon X1950 Pro is the card I would choose out of all of the video cards you've listed (as most others have pointed out).

Reply 7 of 11, by watson

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appiah4 wrote:

I'm not sure how big a deal the memory bandwidth difference is as the AGP bus would probably be the bottleneck for transferring textures anyway? Also, the memory size of 1Gb probably makes life a lot easier for games beyond 2004.

I have that exact card.

AGP bandwidth is only very loosely connected to memory bandwidth.
Basically, data is first transferred to the GPU through the AGP bus at 2.133 GB/s (for AGP 8X).
When you're playing a game, that data is constantly being manipulated and going from VRAM to GPU and vice versa. This is where memory bandwidth matters.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that's the general idea. See last post here: https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/agp-8x-b … dwidth.1325771/
In the same way, PCI-E 3.0 has a throughput of "only" 15.8 GB/s, while cards can have insane memory bandwidth nowadays (897 GB/s for Tesla V100).
Even the "measly" 9800 Pro from 2003 has 21.76 GB/s, thanks to a 256-bit memory bus.

This trend of crippling perfectly capable GPUs has been going on forever, usually by halving the bus width (TNT2 M64, MX200, FX5200...) or using slower memory (DDR2 on HD 4650, DDR4 on GT 1030).

1GB of RAM would be very nice... if there was enough bandwidth. You have a lot of space to store the textures (for example at 1080p), but you can't send them to the GPU fast enough and performance tanks.
This card should have been the third fastest AGP card (after 3850 and 4670), but it sometimes ends up struggling to compete with several years older cards.

Please note I don't have any concrete FPS numbers to back these claims up, it's just what I've subjectively observed.
I do plan to benchmark this card (among others) once I build a faster AGP system, the best I've got right now is a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4.

Reply 9 of 11, by candle_86

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x1950 Pro, the HD3850 was marketed more towards peoiple with 939 AGP rigs with an X2 or folks with a PentiumD/Core2 build on AGP

Reply 10 of 11, by appiah4

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candle_86 wrote:

x1950 Pro, the HD3850 was marketed more towards peoiple with 939 AGP rigs with an X2 or folks with a PentiumD/Core2 build on AGP

This is what I ended up doimg.. X1950 in S754, HD3850 in a future S939 and the 9800 in a Socket A build..

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 11 of 11, by swaaye

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X1950 with Catalyst 7.11 or older. The OpenGL is hosed for old games after that point.

Those R500 cards have lovely 16-bit color dithering for old D3D games. Looks better than GeForce 6/7. This is great for DGVoodoo1 too.

Radeon HD cards are best for DirectX 9 and newer.