Like all AGP cards released nowadays, this one will have an extra premium added to its price for being AGP, which sucks.

And probably have loads of driver issues. There have been serious problems with ATI's other recent PCIe-to-AGP bridged cards... They have had special driver builds (aka hotfixes) just for them. Ugly stuff.

Actually this flaky AGP thing has been going on for years, through many card generations. I had an AGP-bridged X800XL for a while years ago. They actually broke AGP support in their Catalyst releases for like 5 months, I remember.

It is definitely time to move on to PCIe instead of playing with these cards.

Actually, AFAIK, Newegg has been selling HD 4650 AGPs for a couple of weeks or more. The announcement they were coming goes back maybe 3-4 months, though, so they certainly weren't in a hurry!

TTBOMK, the price premium is only truly justified in the case of the motherboards, for which AGP actually is a great deal more complicated and expensive to implement (than ISA, PCI, or PCI-e), which is why Dell, HP, and Sony made it a habit to omit it entirely from their cheapest PCs.

Regarding the comment about the X800 XL, it has always been my own understanding that neither the AGP nor the PCI-e versions were directly related at the circuit board level. I thought that they were supposed to have been designed separately. The low end X** cards were remakes of the prior year's Radeon 9600s, but once again, I understood that they were fully re-engineered, not merely equipped with a bridging chip, like nVIDIA's PCX versions of the horrible FXes.

I dont know who to believe when it comes to problems, or lack of them, when running this "new" ATI 2000, 3000 and now 4000 cards. Some write in their reviews that they are a scam, that the hotfix drivers dont work and they have nothing but problems. Others write that the cards work amazing, and they havent run into any problems with their cards. I have an old computer P4 3GHZ HT with a d865perl intel board, which I would like to get an AGP card for, but I dont want to spend on these cards and find that they dont work.

I bought a 3850 awhile back for my brothers A7N8X motherboard. It previously had an X800 from 2002 in there. Seems to work fine, it can even play Crysis at low resolutions fairly decently whereass with the X800 I think it could get like 2-3fps. 😀

but yeah it's way past time to move on. I just had to put a new video card in there to extend it's life a bit more.

Kiwi wrote:

Regarding the comment about the X800 XL, it has always been my own understanding that neither the AGP nor the PCI-e versions were directly related at the circuit board level. I thought that they were supposed to have been designed separately.

The X generation was the one where ATI first went PCIe. The original X800s (R420/R423) are purely AGP chips. However, R430 and R480 are pure PCIe. R430 is what the X800XL cards used usually (some were a crippled R480). To make an AGP X800XL, they had to use a PCIe->AGP bridge chip called RIALTO and that is what they are still using today I believe. You can see that chip on the boards, on the backside. Apparently using a bridge chip is not a transparent affair because it has absolutely caused lots of problems.

Let's face the fact: PCIe is a lot better than AGP. AGP is dead.

Remember all problems with "agp settings in bios". That's because AGP was some sort of PCI bus patch rather than a real bus altogether.

temptingthelure wrote:

I dont know who to believe when it comes to problems, or lack of them, when running this "new" ATI 2000, 3000 and now 4000 cards.

From what I've gathered over the years, it is a problem that is also affected by mobo chipset. I haven't personally used anything with a PCIe->AGP bridge since the X800XL that I had. I used it with a VIA K8T800-based mobo. Like I said there was a period of about 5 months (5 Catalyst releases or so) where the drivers wouldn't work in D3D at all. It was back during the Catalyst 7.x era. I think people on some other chipsets were ok, but I had to stick with old drivers and then it worked perfectly fine.

A web search for ATI AGP problems will find you lots of tales.. 😀 Their purely AGP cards are completely fine. It's just the bridged things that are problematic.

eL_PuSHeR wrote:

Let's face the fact: PCIe is a lot better than AGP. AGP is dead.

Remember all problems with "agp settings in bios". That's because AGP was some sort of PCI bus patch rather than a real bus altogether.

PCIe had better be better cuz it's TEH NEWERER!!!! 😀

Really though, AGP was perfectly fine once we got into the AGP 4x age. Early on it sucked a lot for many reasons.

swaaye wrote:

temptingthelure wrote:

I dont know who to believe when it comes to problems, or lack of them, when running this "new" ATI 2000, 3000 and now 4000 cards.

From what I've gathered over the years, it is a problem that is also affected by mobo chipset. I haven't personally used anything with a PCIe->AGP bridge since the X800XL that I had. I used it with a VIA K8T800-based mobo. Like I said there was a period of about 5 months (5 Catalyst releases or so) where the drivers wouldn't work in D3D at all. It was back during the Catalyst 7.x era. I think people on some other chipsets were ok, but I had to stick with old drivers and then it worked perfectly fine.

A web search for ATI AGP problems will find you lots of tales.. 😀 Their purely AGP cards are completely fine. It's just the bridged things that are problematic.

Yeah, i was talking about the new AGP cards that use the bridge thing. So i suppose it's pure luck depending on whether you have a board that plays nice with it. I suppose the one i had, this 865 intel board, didnt play nice with the 6800XT card i bought for it. It wouldnt show any signals or post at all. I dont know if that card was already a bridged one. An older 6200 works fine. That board is 3.3v, meets all the requirements for the 6800 card, why it wouldnt work is still a mystery to me. And i dont want to spend in a new bridged card and find out it doesnt work either. Maybe i should just get a whole new pc here. But that's more expensive. 🤣

Here's a review:
http://www.rage3d.com/reviews/video/sapphirehd4650/

I don't get the point of buying a current generation AGP card when any system wiith an AGP slot is likely to be more CPU limited than GPU limited anyways.

Edit: Also, for those who don't want to read the article, it says the card should sell for $75.

Does it actually sell for $75?

ooh for that much i'll get one, i'm sure i can find a good machine with agp to put it in i think i have p4 system that has agp wich i've been neglecting.

Here's an interesting article on getting what is left on your older AGP rig from Toms Hardware Guide.

Also another article on this same Radeon AGP GPU.

I do agree that the 3850 is a good card. That Athlon XP I threw it in loves it.

Found this:
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33952327