Radeon HD 3850 AGP The fastest AGP Graphics Card

[@OzTalksHW]

I had the PCIe version of the 3850 (picked it up from VisionTeks Mystery Box a year or two ago) and it was a solid 720p to 1080p card for eSport titles at the time. It's no shock that it's doing so well with games from the early 2000s, even at higher resolutions. Nice video! Everytime I watch I always want to build a retro PC lol. I suppose that means you're doing your job well! Keep it up :D

[@philscomputerlab]

Thank you man! Yea I dabbled a bit into the modern stuff, but my heart is really with the older gear. Playing around with parts that I lusted for back in the day, that's what it's all about. I will still do the occasional modern video though :D

[@benjiderrick4590]

those cards are still better than those integrated graphics solutions from 4th Gen Intel core processors.

[@isvarco]

5th as well :D my thinkpad x250 can't handle far cry even at low with decent fps on HD5500 integrated with i5 5300U

[@RetroTinkerer]

So nice to see you interacting with Phil! I really like your videos too and the way you approach parts and system value on a pretty tight budget!

[@berto649]

Watch both of your videos before work. What a time to be into tech. Looking forward to your guys next vid’s!

[@WaybackTECH]

I remember years ago the Chinese were selling PCI-E to AGP adapters with that bridge chip on them. Sadly i never found one after starting my channel. I guess they were not around very long and no one bought them apparently.

[@joncarter3761]

Think I swapped from AGP to PCIE when I upgraded my Pentium 4 to a Core2Duo back in 2008, I remember being so glad I wouldn't be having to look for AGP specific reviews again when shopping for a graphics card!

[@philippepanayotov9632]

I have both the HD3850 and the HD4670. The first one is better for FPS games, however Civ5 benefits better from the second card. I own the two top AGP video cards and it is a very satisfactory feeling. Both needed a change of two capacitors each but I still enjoy them both to this day. The AGP era of gaming was so romantic.

[@NightMotorcyclist]

I was one of the stragglers holding onto AGP with my AMD Opteron 170 system. I stuck with the nVidia Geforce 6600GT but my local retailer had the GeForce 7800 AGP and Radeon HD 3850 AGP stocked up and those cards barely sold, thus they dropped the price to around $150 at the time. I wanted to buy one but I figured I should use that money towards a motherboard with PCIe and moving to a more modern graphics card without having to jump through hoops or be left with a dead end.

[@homelessEh]

im still clinging to a hp wx9300 opteron dual socket opteron 270 system with dreams of some day having extra money to buy the 8 gb of ddr ecc memory to make it purr again... rams died leaving me with only 2gb of ram for it to limp along on single socket mode.. SOOooooOOooommmmEeee dayy......Some where.....some how..... maybe....... its just so obsolete its fallen off the bottom of the prioritys chart..

[@reed2196]

Back in the day I had HD3850 AGP on a socket 939 with Athlon 64 3200+ initially and then upgraded to Athlon 64 x2 3800+ which made a huge difference for games of that era like Batman Arkham Asylum or NFS ProStreet.

[@another3997]

Years ago I had an old P4 machine as my main PC. I cobbled it together from used parts I collected, but I eventually upgraded the GPU to a brand new Radeon HD4670 AGP. It was about the fastest AGP card I could find at the time, and it did cope admirably, although the P4 was a bottleneck. I still have that P4 + GPU. 😁

[@Microang]

I have two of these 3850s and a 2600XT AGP as well. If I remember correctly I used to download the "AGP" drivers from Sapphire's website as the official ones never worked and they were pretty decent at keeping them updated. Back in the day I never had money so stayed on a Pentium 4 1.5-2.4GHz 478 for years in an old Packard Bell iMedia (green) tower, until my brother got me a 3.2GHz Pentium 4, but it was 775 so I ended up buying an AsRock 775 "Frankenstein" AGP board that supported C2Q to upgrade the machine as I had the 2600XT at that point and couldn't afford a graphics card as well. Later I upgraded that machine to the HD 3850 still using the Pentium 4 and remember how it could run Crysis great for about 5 mins until the machine ran out of RAM, oh and it would take like 15 mins to load the map as it only had 1GB RAM and an IDE hard drive and obviously I had to run it at max settings, even at low res. Don't know how I ever managed to finish that game on that machine. The best part is I still have that machine built exactly as it was but haven't used it in years. Maybe I should drop in a Q6600 and see how that goes? :D

[@mvShooting]

Mine had a weird "bug" that made it ran everything stuttery with Windows 7, but not in Windows Vista.

[@Microang]

M. V. Shooting That was probably a driver issue, I seem to remember drivers made a huge difference on 7 as I ran that machine through the windows 7 betas until RTM as Vista never worked on my machine so I dual booted with XP. But then I was running that machine daily until 2010, which seems insane in retrospect.

[@Microang]

M. V. Shooting I think the last catalyst for these cards was 12 from memory so Phil was running an old driver.

[@Microang]

Johann Apart from ruining the originality of the motherboard, would that work? They only officially support Kentsfield quad cores...

[@Microang]

Johann It's an AsRock 775i65G 2.0, it's the only board that supports AGP only and C2Q I believe.

[@retropcscotland4645]

Plenty of information here. Very in depth. I have one of these cards still HD3850 AGP. TBH I won't part with it. Keeping it because it is a strong card. Great video as always Phil.

[@jeremyjohnson8844]

Byte Syze no, it's not a strong card.

[@retropcscotland4645]

Was I talking to you? Bolt ya nugget.

[@kathleendelcourt8136]

I had the Powercolor HD3850 paired with a 2800+ XP Barton and 2Gb of 333Mhz DRR memory. I chose the Radeon HD3850 AGP because I couldn't afford a whole new system and it sounded like a reasonable upgrade. I did not regret it. This setup allowed me to play FEAR, STALKER, Mass Effect 1 & 2... with max detail because the only bottleneck was the CPU and all my older games were running wonderfully with max AA and AF for perfect image quality. I only replaced it in 2011 for a brand new Sandy Bridge system (i3-2100 + Radeon HD6850) and I'm still using that same motherboard on my current compter! I replaced the i3-2100 with a i7-3770K, changed the HD6850 for a R9 390 (I had a GTX 970 for a time but got a full refund during the 3.5Gb gate), and went from 4Gb to 12Gb of Ram. And that rig is still kicking strong today.

[@GraveUypo]

good cards, all of them. If that 6850 was a 6950 it'd be perfect. i went from 6800GS AGP to a 8800GT then a 6950, then 970gtx which i got a full refund for because it was a defective piece of trash that couldn't handle it's own stock clocks and with the money i bought my current rx480 and had some spare change left over. later i bought 2 1070s but that was only for mining so it doesn't count. i've sold them for a 25% profit each too back in march. they certainly were my best purchases ever. never had actually profited from gpus before, lol. got a nice $200 extra on them plus the mining time, which from june 17 to march 18 added up to about $2000 with my 3 cards. not bad. will be sure to put that towards my 7nm ryzen and navi card, since this 2500k will probably start showing its age pretty soon, even at 4.7ghz.

[@saxxonpike]

These things are awesome! I currently own a working HD 4670 AGP and the HDMI output is particularly useful on it. I could only get cards like these to work on boards that had AGP 8x support. Older motherboards probably won't run cards like these at all even if it physically fits in the slot. Of course I had to run some VGA games on it, and Jill of the Jungle appears to have graphics corruption. So not really a good candidate for "let's put HDMI on a DOS box" builds.

[@CaptainShiny5000]

While I didn't own an HD3850 I had an HD4870 and that was a bit of a disappointment cause with it I couldn't get a couple of older games to run properly anymore like X-Wing Alliance or Mechwarrior 3 all due to them needing a 16-Bit Z-Buffer and that wasn't supported anymore starting with the 4000 series of ATI cards. From that point on I switched to NVidia and never went back to team red, cause Nvidia still has 16-Bit Z-Buffer support on all of their cards which makes retrogaming on modern computers a lot easier.

[@HatlabuFarkas]

the missing rocket is : X1950pro ultra

[@apreese16]

Lol i bought this card for $5 at my local computer store only to end up being too scared to try it in my Dell Dimension 8200 because of the 250w psu

[@virtualtools_3021]

@@apreese16 that would have been a tschernobyl moment if you did try it

[@3DfxAslinger]

Nice, so many fast AGP cards in your collection!

[@TAnimations]

NostalgicAslinger Rip agp

[@mitsostechtips9047]

i have a geforce4 and sapphire hd 2600 pro

[@HAZRDOne]

That HIS X1950 pro is the stuff of dreams.

[@cesiumion]

@@TAnimations agp sucked ass

[@AwankO]

The HIS hd radeon had the last AGP version in 2009 for cheap, had to send it back because of proprietary motherboard parts, it would not slot completely in, what a bummer!

[@KomradeShotabollokov]

The fact that the bridge chip is called a Rialto is probably not a coincidence. I guess ATI felt a little Venetian at the time. Thanks for the video, Phil. Top notch, as usual.

[@shamejais9843]

I actually have the ATI Radeon HD 3850 right now in my computer! :)

[@airmicrobe]

I got it yesterday

[@igorriss3614]

Me too with P4 478 socket, 865 intel

[@warrax111]

I doubt they have AGP version, that's why they told " only HD 3850" .

[@shamejais9843]

@Da Mighty Shabba sorry I don't have it anymore

[@igorriss3614]

@Da Mighty Shabba I had three agp HD3850 but now just only one, other with problem. Services do not want to waste time with old graphic cards. Good luck to find any!

[@AncientGameplays]

Well, this is a video that deserves the biggest like i cab give :D I myself, will be testing a GTS 8800 (NVidia) and i am pretty excited to see what it can do :D

[@blakecasimir]

Another great video, Phil. But a lot of those CPU-bound graphs are telling us - and begging you hint hint :D - to do a follow up video with that "exotic" Core 2 Duo + AGP setup with the 3850! I'd like to see that, at least. :) I wonder if yours is one of those infamous ASRock boards? I had a couple of those, they didn't last long...

[@philscomputerlab]

Yup, Asrock made all the cool stuff :D

[@Lady_Zenith]

Back in the day I had asrock ConRoe865PE + E4300 @ 2,7Ghz in it. I took it cause it was the only full ATX Core2 board with AGP and 4x DDR1 slots. It was a no brainer choice, I had GF 6800LE unlocked to ultra and 4x512MB of DDR1 and I played RTS and mmo games that were mostly CPU limited. Nowadays I also have bunch of small mATX Gigabyte I865 Core2 compatible boards for retro purposes and the Asrock dual VSTA with the VIA chipset which also has DDR2 and PCI-E 4x slot, but that one is pretty crappy when it comes to compatibility and performance, the I865 does better and is fully win98 compatible.

[@philscomputerlab]

Hopefully I will have something similar soon!

[@Lady_Zenith]

Yeah I actually do not have the Conroe865 from Asrock anymore, it died after about 4 years. It slowly started to lose the ability to run on high FSB and one day it just did not power up. Back in those days, Asrock made many interesting boards and experiments none else went to, but unfortunately the quality of their products was really bad. They even refused 3Y warranty and for a good reason. Only past say 5 years Asrock was able to climb up and now sits I would say at second after Asus. On the other hand the Gigabyte 865 boards for core2, all 3 of them that I have still work fine. Gigabyte was really good back then.

[@mitsostechtips9047]

i know asrock, in my country they are popular, together with gigabyte, i think that asus made those motherboards ''value for money'', for those guys that they want to build a pc with less money, it is asus motherboard with cheaper capacitors, chipsets, and other components

[@saxxonpike]

Related to your survey at the end of the video, I used a Radeon 9600 Pro for quite a long time in the 2000s, and only after I went to Core 2 did I start using PCI Express. Though it wasn't due to AGP preference, just what parts I had available at the time.

[@JockoV]

Great video! I love seeing tech that is maxed out. I had a 1.4GHz Pentium III Tualatin (which was the best Pentium III you could get) back in the day with an AGP slot. I never used the AGP slot though but now you've got me daydreaming of going back in time with a HD 3850 AGP card and giving it to myself to have a completely maxed out system :)

[@solarstrike33]

If you have a Slot 1 board with a 440BX board, it won't even fit. You'll need to find a P3 board with Universal AGP support (i8xx series).

[@solarstrike33]

@Torsional Isotope Technophobia It's not about the practicality, man. It's about If It Can™run it at all!

[@televiciousgoober]

Had that Sapphire version from 2007 - 2013 with a Core2Quad system and it held up pretty good. The DDR2 RAM bottlenecked more than the AGP Bus interface.

[@Vienna3080]

It’s insane these are now going for more then it was at retail

[@nomdplume1606]

I had always wanted the agp version of this card. I wound up with the 4650 agp as it was quite a bit cheaper even back then. It was paired with athlon X2 3800+. I still have fond memories of that pc. When the motherboard died (K8M800) just last year I was literally heartbroken.

[@zenstrata]

I have one of these (the sapphire 3850 agp), It's the one I bought and put into my system years ago. It allowed me to play more modern games for a long time on my old computer. It's a great card.

[@RetroAdventure]

We have been talking about this off and on and everyone seems to be split between the HD 3850 and the HD 4650

[@bloeckmoep]

Retro Adventure: Go with the HD3850... the 4650/4670 has audio loop out... that causes in some cases problems with win xp and service pack 3. The work around to that is go with vanilla xp and update to sp2, then install agp drivers including hd audio, then update to sp3. That way it accepts those drivers. When you go with the 3850 nothing of that sort is necessary.

[@dieterhrabak4947]

Still using HD 4650, clearly it getting long in the tooth, still it was a superior one over my GeForce 5200 AGP, not comparing apple with apple.. I understand that..

[@weepingscorpion8739]

I still do not own a PC that uses PCI Express. My P4 from 2004 is my last desktop and it does have a high-end AGP card but I think the power supply is not strong enough for it to run smoothly so when I look at that system again I may switch the power supply. I did find an old Fujitsu Siemens server in a dumpster a few months ago and have been planning to get it up and running again but as a modern Win 10 system so maybe then I'll have my first experiences with PCI-E.

[@Distriived]

I scored this card on ebay for less than 30 dollars! I gotta say it's a beast of an agp card

[@philscomputerlab]

Bargain!

[@Distriived]

they posted it asis. I took the gamble and it fired right up. I was so excited

[@Darxide23]

Nice score. "As is" is usually eBay code for "doesn't work, but I want to pretend that it might work so someone will buy it".

[@shiva_MMIV]

TheDarxide23 It depends, with agp cards can mean "the last time I see an agp card working I was in diapers, so I'm going to sell this card I obtained for free and don't have any use for cheap and 'as is' so I'm covered if it doesn't work". With more modern hardware yes, 99% of the times means 'don't work'

[@DiGI83]

I have 3 of them, all from Club 3D. Got them all for local Sellers, 2 for 12€ each and one CIB for 30€!

[@EweToobUsername]

You should look for an Asrock 865PE motherboard. They’re not cheap but considering they support Core 2 e6000/q6000 processors, you’ll get just about all the performance you can from those cards.

[@Carstuff111]

The only thing that would have made this a better PC, would have been to install an AMD Athlon 64 x2. I had an AMD 64 x2 4200+ on an MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum motherboard and upgraded that machine to as high as an AGP ATi Radeon X1950 Pro graphics card. That beast served me well for a lot longer than I would have ever expected. And as far as I know, that machine is still working to this day. And how about that, you have an exact example of the X1950 Pro I had lol.

[@CryptoJordanVR]

I'd love to see either you or someone else do a benchmark comparison between this and the fastest PCI graphics card.

[@nyxzo]

😂

[@braydoncoate]

agp is so much faster dude

[@CryptoJordanVR]

@u knoe wat dis is The Radeon 6900 XT is PCIe. I said PCI.

[@TheVanillatech]

@@CryptoJordanVR The fastest PCI card is probably a Geforce 8400, and the 3850 AGP destroys it. The 4670 AGP destroys it even more.

[@CryptoJordanVR]

@@TheVanillatech Actually, the most powerful PCI graphics card comes down to 3 Zotac Nvidia cards. The GT 430, the GT 520, and the GT 610. Which, although massively more powerful than what you stated, you'd still be correct as the 3870 is still about 50% faster than any of those even when just comparing the PCIe versions.

[@A-BYTE94]

I had high res CRT monitor back in the day, impressive 1440x1080, it was big and heavy AF

[@greyfox37]

I had the X800XT PE. That was my last AGP card. Really good one too. I upgraded to a 7800GTX which was a great card.

[@syncmonism]

That was one of the first ones which was an AGP version of what was originally a PCI-E graphics card, using a bridge chip just like this 3850, right?

[@kevinlawson1746]

Drivers play a big part in what a Graphics card can do , so a Windows XP driver will be a lot different then a Windows Vista driver and also an older driver can sometimes work better then newer ones , you can also come across universal drivers or untested drivers as well, so playing around with different drivers can have some very different results. Oh and playing around with the setting in the BIOS can give you a better performance or make it worse.

[@KevinArcade87]

My old system was AGP and when I was looking to upgrade I instead purchased a 3850 instead of simple getting a PCIe system 😆

[@mikeytee6821]

SAME here. The 3850 was my last AGP card and it was to keep my system at the time going a little longer before FINALLY switching to a PCIe mobo and upgrading everything!

[@draxoronxztgs1212]

Have both of the Sapphire HD3850 and HIS H4670 agp's with original boxes and all accessories I bought back in 2008-2009. Never thought it could be worth that much as I payed for them (and even more) 10 years later.

[@RuruFIN]

I have that Sapphire card myself, paired with Asrock AM2NF3-VSTA, Athlon 64 X2 6000+ @ 3.2GHz & 4GB DDR2-800. Awesome build for WinXP gaming :)

[@talvisota327]

that board even supports phenom II x4 cpus

[@a.sanford8731]

I just picked up an Nvidia 7800 AGP for $2. Not sure if it works yet, but either way I'm thrilled to have it. I'm planning to either do a Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 X2 build with it for retro gaming. If not, I'll try and scoop up one of these guys. Great video!

[@WouterVerbruggen]

Just installed one of those Sapphire HD3850 cards in my P4 extreme retro build! I knew I had to get it when I saw it with an asking price of just €15 on the local second-hand marketplace. But man, that thing is noisy A F! Replaced the fan with a ThermalTake DuOrb, runs great with even a nice overclock on it

[@TheUmart]

nice video!however,you've mentioned that you've used 8.3 catalyst for this card,and archive on your site doesn't have them.i can attest that later drivers from your archive don't work,and of all of them,for later radeon agp cards only 9.12 would be suitable as 10/11/xxx series drivers offer subpar performance in most of the era appropriate games. don't get me wrong,i really do appreciate all of your work as you really are a reference of retro pc stuff,but for clarity sake because nobody has definitive resource for those later agp radeons i thought it would be of an use to contribute at least as a comment. and i've aggregated all of "agp hotfix' drivers that i could find and test myself and i do plan on at least linking them on vogons so all of us can have them. again,thanks for all of your hard work,as benchmarking and getting those pesky old cards running (for example my 850xt,4890 and gf 7950 all died in one damn week) is really painfull, and i could only imagine all of the work you've had to put in to film all of that as well. :)

[@soton000]

This card was faster than fastest processor for478 socket .Poor Pentium 4 was a massive bottleneck

[@mafyatekin]

I love hearing that "PhilsComputerLab Theme Song®/Ending Song/OST". Funky Jazz really does fit to the channel.

[@roztoczynski.m]

As always, I loved your video Phil. I think that this topic can be covered more deeply, but as it is it's already 20 minutes video :) Worth noting is that X850XT is probably the best usable W98 card. A lot of DX6 titles work without a problem and I am using PowerColor X850XT PE AGP to play anything from around 1997-1998 to 2005. 6 and 7 series cards can't come even close in terms of compatibility. HD3850 is sort of strange card. You can't use anything older than XP with it, so you can go with PCI-E version, and possibly - much better HD4850 instead. As you said - it's more an collectors item. Keep in mind, that NFS series is very CPU bound. I made an comment some time ago regarding 6800 series card underperforming in your videos. I confirmed that some time ago - even Athlon 64 X2 overclocked to 2,6GHz or Pentium D @ 4,2GHz are too slow for NFS: U2 with everything maxed out (and more importantly: rearview mirror turned on). Dips in framerates went away only when I switched to Pentium E5800 @ 4,3GHz! The same applies to first Underground: even X850XT is able to keep 60FPS @ 1600x1200 as long as you feed it with enough CPU power. As for me, I jumped to PCI-E quite early in 2006 when I swapped my outdated and voltomodded 9550@9600XT to 7600GS. Change was quite impressive.

[@philscomputerlab]

Thanks for sharing your experiences. Yea there is so much to cover with these cards, but we will unpack it slowly. I pay good attention to the comments to see what people find interesting :)

[@roztoczynski.m]

valis Catalyst 6.2 for Windows 98 work nicely with X850 series cards despite not being certified

[@mvShooting]

That was nice! I was a late PCIe adopter. I was almost forced out of it, since I was stuck with this same 3850 AGP. Had to deal with integrated NVIDIA graphics until I could afford a PCIe graphics card.

[@Lukas_Miglioranza]

I've an old agp computer at home and today I was asking myself which was the better, or one of the 2 better graphic card of that era. In a really nice video I found the answer! Thank You very much!

[@thereallantesh]

This was a really interesting video. AGP seemed like it came and went in the blink of an eye. I think I only had one AGP video card, and before it came time to replace it I was already moving on to a new motherboard. The industry moved so quickly back then. I've really slowed down on new builds since then. My current system is 8 years old now. Wow I really need to build something new again.

[@philscomputerlab]

AGP was around for a few years at least, starting with the old Riva TNT and first GeForce cards, all the way up to the GeForce 6 and 7!

[@thereallantesh]

@@philscomputerlab I'm sure it was around longer than I remember. I had probably simply moved on at that point, and just don't remember anymore. That was so many years ago. Thanks for the great info.

[@CHiLL72]

I recently bought a Sapphire HD3850 AGP card for very little money. Now I'm looking for a good Socket 939 mainboard with AGP to put it in. I enjoyed this video, as always! Keep up the good work Phil!

[@saulaaa2387]

ASRock 939Dual-SATA2

[@antonelrotaru20]

I still have my PowerColor HD 3850 Xtreme PCI-E version video card that kept most of the games from that time at a more than decent framerate. This was my first really high-end performance graphics card. With its massive cooling system, it still looks impressive for today standards. It still works like a charm and maybe that's why I should try to get it working in a retro PC! Congratulations. You have some very good reviews.🤗

[@Carstuff111]

Holy cow!! I used to have an HIS IceQ3 Turbo X1950 Pro AGP, with 512MB of RAM! I loved that card, I used it for years. When I got it, it was already a couple years old, it took another year for me to get a power supply powerful enough to run it, used it for a good, long time on an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ that was overclocked to 2.7GHz from 2.2GHz, 2GB of DDR 400 OCZ RAM, MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum motherboard, Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum, running Windows XP Pro 64bit. Every component in that machine had a lot of mileage on them when I got them, and yet, I got many more years out of all of them. I miss old faithful, she was a reliable, amazing work horse. Then I upgraded... and realized just how much I was missing out on....

[@Ty-ri7dy]

Ahhh... the good old days when our video cards came with transparent neon colored fan shrouds and pictures of buxom CGI fantasy girls. What a great time that was to be a gamer.

[@dabombinablemi6188]

Looking at reviews, the 3850's AGP version would have been capable of playing Fallout 3 at 1080p/60fps with medium settings.

[@billyjoejimbob75]

Holy crap, that's nuts. For the price of an AGP card for some old ass comp, you can buy a frikkin core i5 dell refurb.

[@mbe102]

I wonder how the 3850 compares to the X1950 Pro 256MB from Visiontek.

[@GiSWiG]

You must be a very safe driver. Even in NFS, you try to stay in lane! I had a regular 6800 AGP before getting two PCIe 7950GT in SLI. Last year I got a GF 7800GS AGP for $8 but seeing that I'm less of a collector, I sold it for $80 and it got me a Voodoo 3 3000. I kept a 6800GT for the Win98 support. Nice video! I liked the high-end AGP comparison. Nice idea.

[@uk4890]

Congrantz Phil Great video and review of the fastest AGP vcard!!

[@khoifoto]

Thanks for reviewing this card. Back in the day, I have the exact same card and a 2600 pro. Those good old days

[@joeyschmidt6841]

I used to have so many AGP cards that I sold on when I upgraded. I also upgraded quite often back then, switching between ATi and nVidia on a regular basis. I still have a Radeon X1950 Pro (the one with the AGP-PCI-E bridge chip), but I used to have a GeForce 4800, Radeon 9800 and a GeForce 6800 (which could OC to Ultra specs). I gave or sold most of these on thinking I would never need them again, but I have an old build I need to run Windows 98 on (I know right?!) so I can use some old hardware and software to rescue a bunch of old songs/tunes I wrote back in the day. Windows XP isn't cutting it because it won't register an important SCSI DLL file, which I need to communicate with a sampler. Anyway, thank you for some good retro PC content.

[@joeyschmidt6841]

Oh, I also still have a Voodoo 3, but the board has took a wee dunt. :(

[@brydon10]

I had an X850 XT back in the day. That card was so powerful it was amazing. It also looked really cool. I miss the AGP days.

[@CommodoreFan64]

This video is excellent timing, as I recently scored a free Dell Dimension 4600 system from the local recycle drop off, and have been looking at video cards for it, so this should help me out on what to keep my eyes open for, as I want the best I can get, and max out the system. So If I can get the drivers to run I'll be dual booting Windows 98, and Windows XP(each setup on different HDD as I have 2 SATA ports in the system). Far as having a system during the AGP to PCI-E switch over, I kind of missed it, since I only had a basic 14in ACER Windows XP laptop for getting online along with older games, lightweight games, and emulators at that point in time, and was doing most of my gaming on a GameCube, along with my other retro consoles, and honestly did not really get back into PC gaming till around late 08 when I had better finances with my work, and was able to build a proper system with dual Nvidia 9500GT 1GB cards in SLI(got a crazy black friday deal on them from Tigerdirect).

[@AtariBorn]

Just a heads up, You can pick up a small adapter to convert your 4 pin proprietary fan plug into a standard 3 pin PWM so you can use a regular cooler on a standard ATX case. Also, they make a cable to convert that Soundblaster Live style front panel audio port to a standard front panel audio for that standard case. I also picked a cable to plug into the power switch/reset switch/HDD LED/power LED port and it has standard pins to connect to the front panel. I scored a Dimension 4600 a while back, one that I upgraded for a friend a few years before. 4 GB of DDR 400 and a Pentium 4 3.4Ghz Northwood. I added a Zalman copper core cooler to make sure it never gets hot. You'll need to pick up a socket 478 backplate to mount an aftermarket cooler as the Dell all in one cooling system on a 4600 uses the side panel to mount the heatsink.

[@mitsostechtips9047]

i am doing the same thing, in my computer i have ide hdd drive, i have one with windows xp for retro gaming, and one with windows 7 for modern gaming on pentium4 2.89ghz, 1gb ddr1 ram, and Ati sapphire 2600 pro hd 512mb vram, it is quite decent

[@mitsostechtips9047]

*2.80ghz

[@Jivemaster2005]

Great video, Phil :-) had been waiting for this one. Too bad your 4670 card is kaputt, I might bench mine against my 3850 when I get my high end AGP system up and running again. If I remember correctly the 4670 felt slower than the 3850 even without doing any benchmarks. Finally, it would be fun to see how the AGP version of the 7950GT fares against these cards.

[@ZeroG84]

TV out

[@picoherbie9987]

In around 2004, I built a dual Opteron system with a 9800 Pro. In 2007 I put an x1950 Pro in it. In 2009 I looked to upgrade it again, but it made more since to go to a new system with PCIe then it was to squeeze any more performance out of it. It speaks more to the dual Opteron system, and lack of multi threaded applications at the time, but had I bought an Opteron board with PCIe, I probably could have gotten at least 5 more years out of that system.

[@03chrisv]

Fastest AGP card I've ever owned was the GeForce 6800 GT. Slowest PCI Express card I've ever owned was a Radeon 3870. Favorite video card was the Radeon 9800 XT. That was THE card to get for Half Life 2. Though Doom 3 ran better on the GeForce 6800 GT.

[@sl9sl9]

Yes! I had a Radeon 9800 non-PRO and the Radeon 9x00 series (R300) was my favourite too. It ran everything you could throw at it in gorgeous 32-bit color, was an enormous leap over everything before, and reasonably priced to boot. Nvidia's competing GeForce FX 5800 series sucked ass, it wasn't until 6800 that Nvidia got its house in order. I have such fond memories of my 9800 in Doom 3, Half Life 2 and Max Payne 2 - 2003 was a helluva year eh! ;)

[@mikkomansikka5704]

I had 9800SE which I upgraded to gainward 7800GS Golden Sample, which basically was 7900GT on agp bus, with 512mb vram on it. That golden sample was my favourate card on agp aswell my fastest one.

[@paulowen7560]

What about the the non official Gainward AGP 7 series cards that used the 7900 GT chip that nVidia banned being used on AGP? Surely that was the fastest AGP card?

[@carnivorebear6582]

I had a 7600 GT on AGP with a socket 775 P4 (motherboard sadly didnt support upgrade to Core2 Duos), served its purpose for a long while until eventually I upgraded to a first gen i7 with a HD 5770. Quite the upgrade!

[@scorg]

This was a bit of a random surprise find tonight. As I happen to have this card laying around still, as well as a 7800GS (this gpu was seriously underclocked out the box, they were just GT's rebadged essentially). I had used the HD3850 on with an Asrock 775i65g cored with a Core2Duo as well as the 7800GS (which was a throw over from my older athlon XP system). The items you try your best to keep as you want a new cpu, but dont want to spend on the GPU or the ram! Anyhow, I do still have these cards!

[@GrandmasterBBC]

I had a lot of fun gaming on this card back in the day on my old Dell Pentium 4 system. I could get playable frame rates on COD4 at 1024x768 with everything pretty much set to low graphics. Nail in the coffin was CCO World at War in 2008. It turned into a slideshow and would crash in heavy battle scenes. I still have the PC with the card installed sitting on a shelf in my garage. Need to break it out someday just for fun.

[@KyoshoLP]

I never got around to trying NFS: Most Wanted and your footage made me realize the track you were on was a daytime version of one of the tracks in NFS: Underground. Well, daytime and Autumn as well, judging by the leaves on the trees. That's pretty cool! I should really get around to playing it.

[@davidp4456]

It would be good to see how other cards such the hd 3870 and x1950 xt compare. However finding these today is very difficult.

[@YoSuey]

I remember buying a bfg 6200 oc new when it came out and got a x800xt for free some time later. The power the x800 had compared to the 6200, was nuts to me.

[@PROSTO4Tabal]

I went to the shop back in 2007 with my friend. I bought Shapphire X1950Pro 512MB GDDR3 PCIe and he bought Radeon x1950Pro 512MB AGP version due to his motherboard limitations, memories. I enjoy playing STALKER game

[@GreatGodSajuuk]

My first serious graphical upgrade was a Sapphire HD 3870(going from GF 7600GS AGP) so this video was a bit of a nostalgia trip. A blue AGP sister of my red PCIe card.

[@KARAOTI23]

I have a chance to acquire an HD3870X2 in exchange of a GTX750 2gb plus a small amount of money 15-20€. The Radeon card is a bit special and should be a good pair with the Q6700 but the GTX750 is more versatile (can run modern titles and can also be used in windows XP). I'm not sure if it's the GDDR4 version though. If it is, I'm thinking of making the exchange.

[@mrbrad4637]

I had a GeForce 7600GT AGP card (upgraded too it from a 6600GT) back in around 2007 on my Pentium 4 3.2GHz system, It was a great card for the money back in the day and I still have it in storage today.

[@Robmaniac32]

Very nice! I have the exact same 3850 in agp and pci-e, pretty happy about that!

[@pierregrobbelaar9116]

I have the nvidia winforce 5900xt that my friend flashed bios to 5950(i think model was can't remember)and a gigabyte 6800 vanilla which was a 12 pipeline card but could unlock 4 extra pipelines to make it 16 and then my 7800 gt which was a 16pipeline card where if i can remember correct the pcie version was 20 so it had worst performance.Of all of them my greatest joy was with the 6800 pipecooling no fans.Was running a little hot till i made a custom cooler for it. Great video.I miss the good ol days where agp was king.

[@outtheredude]

I was stuck on AGP until 2015 with an MSI 256MB passively cooled Radeon HD 2600 Pro on an MSI K8N Neo2 nForce3 Ultra motherboard with an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU and 4x1GB of Kingston Cas 2 DDR 400 memory, as it took a long time for me to raise the money for a new build.

[@mitsostechtips9047]

i am using this ati sapphire 2600 pro right now, at agp version 512mb

[@Tmp2k]

I've been looking for one of these for months and they never come up in AGP. I actually bought one a while back but it was a PCI they mis-sold me as AGP. I'm never going to find one at a sensible price after this video :D

[@RoyHess666]

Man I had exact that model of the MSI NX6600GT you mentioned in the video. Good ol' times.

[@Atari8man2011]

Oh Phil you need to get a working HD 4670 agp and test it .. I have the HD 4670 agp in a retro build amd have it overclocked and it's great. The retro build has a Phenom II x4 940 oc to 3.5 and it runs some newer titles like Doom 3 BFG silky smooth under XP with 4gb of DDR2.

[@philscomputerlab]

Phenom II with AGP? Nice! What motherboard are you using?

[@Atari8man2011]

@@philscomputerlab asrock AM2NF3-VSTA

[@josebonilla101]

Now THIS is a video i wanted to see! I've been hunting for one of these beasts for cheap, to replace my Geforce4 Ti 4200 on my "Frankenstein" AsRock 775i65G with a Core 2 Duo X6800, as i'd like to play at 1600x1200 with all details enabled with XP games, like the benchmarks you ran on here.

[@philscomputerlab]

Nice motherboard, I'll have something similar soon, but I think I'll go with a 800 MHz FSB CPU, as at 1066 the Chipset is actually being overclocked.

[@josebonilla101]

Yeah, i leave it at 800 MHz anyways. CPU IPC and the extra core should do more than improve performance, however i have not been able to validate that statement.

[@mtunayucer]

YESS! A LONG AWAITED VIDEO FOR ME! Thank you!

[@Johny40Se7en]

Great card showing old brilliant games. Good video fella.

[@BlackDragon-xn2ww]

Back in those days we got 750 psu's not for the videocard but for the cpu that used extreme amounts of power and put off alot heat I recall my son's Athlon system with a certain config put out enough heat to keep our house warm in middle of winter 20 degrees outside just put alot case fans on it and watched it stoke it never throttled and gamed great summer was hard since the air unit had to contend with it as well as the hot weather outside great video enjoyed it.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea for modern PSUs it seems to be no issues. The Athlon CPUs however are heavy on the 5V rail, this isn't an issue with Athlon 64.

[@Felix-ve9hs]

7:45 for protection and cooling, these PCIe to AGP Bridges can get very hot

[@mt.taraen]

You could send the card to Louis Rossmann maybe.

[@munio1000]

Louis is too busy to fight with Apple shiet :)

[@philscomputerlab]

Haha :D

[@VladislavGoranov]

I remember buying a new ring back in the summer of 2008. Old was was powered by Radeon 9250... The new one was powered by HD4870. What kind of monster was this card back then

[@philscomputerlab]

From a 9250 to 4870, what a nice upgrade! I had a 4850 at some point I believe, loved that single slot card.

[@hikikomorihachiko]

Get a cheap re-flow soldering iron, some tweezers and a magnifier. You should be fine, I've repaired ATI-bridge chip based cards in this way before. Also, I really do recommend throwing a small heatsink onto the bridge chip, they sometimes get hot enough to melt the solder balls under the chip, occasionally bricking them.

[@philscomputerlab]

I will for sure try to learn what to do. Might hit you up for some tips :D

[@kiaas]

old video: but my old HD 3850 supported audio and video over DVI if you got specific kind of DVI to HDMI adapter, as it used some of the extra pins in DVI to provide the audio that HDMI has standard.

[@homelessEh]

while not agp .. i did love me some hd4670 crossfire for a bit. albeit slightly missmatched ended up with a faster gddr3 512 and a 1gb ddr3 model. it was an odd pairing but when it worked it worked Fairly...

[@FourtySixx]

Thanks for the video and code, just ordered a xfx 4670 1gb form electromayne $76.44 aud not too bad

[@Synthematix]

Someones got the 3850 working properly on win98se in the winraid forum, excellent stuff.

[@mdh269]

Wow! These AGP cards were super expensive when I was thinking about buying them off ebay years ago.

[@ambigousBarrel]

Cool video! I have a Nvidia 6800 Ultra AGP myself with a Athlon Barthon (I think that's the right way to spell it!) 3000+ pretty snappy card :) I also have a PCI version of the 6800 GT although I haven't had chance to test it yet, thinking of taking benchmarks of both and seeing what the difference is when I get a PCI-E system together that is suitable for the card :D I wonder if the GT will be able to keep up with the Ultra hmm...

[@3800S1]

I have that card as well, but it died recently so I figured out you can use the quadro FX 4000 (a crippled AGP ultra), use rivia tuner to unlock the remaining shaders, strap it to geforce driver and the best bit is since these are the highest binned dies it overclock like you wouldn't believe. I got my FX 4000 running at 450Mhz and 1200Mhz memory on stock quadro voltage 1.3v, that is less that the factory ultra which run 1.4v at a lower frequency lol. Silicon jackpot! I have not even tried to go higher yet and still have voltages to play with. My guess is 475Mhz should be walk in the park.

[@ambigousBarrel]

That's a pretty neat trick! :) It's always nice to have a card with good OC potential :) Makes for interesting tweaking! :D

[@facebag666]

i have a ati 9800xt in my barton xp 3000 rig, ccpu is even water cooled.

[@benjiderrick4590]

still have two athlons XP laying around, though there are both thoroughbred cores, one 2000+ and one 2400+. Runs hot but fairly capable even tried hitman contracts with an old mx 440 8x. i wonder if i can OC those little bugs...

[@Felix-ve9hs]

I still have an XFX Radeon HD 4650 1GB AGP, found it in the trash but it looks like new and still works

[@Tutankhamun1333]

I still have my his hd 4670 and it has been used alot and it worked perfectly when i reboxed it nearly four years ago when i upgraded from socket 478 to socket 1366.

[@MamaKoalito]

Funny enough, I am currently working on a socket 478 project. This is to build an ultimate machine for Windows XP era. I have been thinking whether to get HD3850 or HD4670 AGP. I sadly sold two 3850s a while ago since I thought, I wold never come back to XP systems again since I finished all the projects I wanted, I thought. Well was not I wrong? So I have been thinking which one to get. Sadly, it is quite tricky to get one these days. I really need to do better job at preserving precious components such as these cards in the future! Fantastic video Phil. Keep up great work!

[@philscomputerlab]

I think either cards will be great additions to your system!

[@MamaKoalito]

I agree, it is just that this video came right on time. I have actually never seen these two particular gfx models being compared in action! You never disappoint.:)

[@CompatibilityMadness]

Buy X1950 Pro, both 4670 and 3850 are b'necked to it's level because of CPUs (even on a bit OC'ed P4EE).

[@MamaKoalito]

I am aware of that. It is more about having a collection of these cards. The X1950 Pro is truly a good card indeed. It would be perfect for P4 just as you said.

[@CompatibilityMadness]

If you are interested in numbers for other GPUs, you can check my thread here : forum.pclab.pl/topic/1160166-AGP-Aftermath/ (text in Polish, but graphs numbers are universal :))

[@TheGoose81]

I am supprised that the Nvidia 79xx series chipsets are not mentioned here, I used to own (until I killed it by OC) An XFX 7950GT AGP card, with 512mb memory, the 79xx chip was made in 2006. I know for a fact that the 7950GT was the very last and fastest Nvidia AGP card made. I currently now own an XFX 7900GS 256MB card. Also the ATI HD 4670 was made in 2009, three years after Nvidia quit making AGP cards, so you could see it as an unfair comparison?

[@KenjiUmino]

you mentioned how ATI dropped support for the AGP variants of some cards in their drivers - back in 2008 i tried to upgrade a friends PC that was still on AGP with one of these radeon HD cards (don't remember wich one in particular) and wasted a whole weekend trying to find a driver that actually works with it until i caved and sent the card back.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea I ran into the same thing recently with a 3650 AGO. It took some special "AGP hotfix driver" to work.

[@KenjiUmino]

i wish someone had told me back then that there is such a driver. i just used a geforce instead and marked it as yet another case of "ati has shitty drivers" as driver problems with ati had been an ongoing theme ever since i had my rage 128

[@philscomputerlab]

You do have a point, it's really not acceptable to need a "special" driver for an AGP card.

[@osgrov]

Nice! I had forgotten the 3850 was also available on AGP, that's pretty darn cool considering it's probably too powerful for most AGP setups - which your benchmarks seem to confirm as well. CPU bottlenecks. :) I had its bigger PCIe brother, the 3870, for many years and it served me very well! Paired with the lovely Core 2, I believe it was the E8600 I had. That system lasted a long time, good stuff.

[@philscomputerlab]

We will have a faster motherboard soon :D

[@trongetsoutofsystem3099]

Im on Radeon since 1950 agp.. Now rocking 7970 :))