There’s still a graphic card with AGP interface? is it true? is AGP is still alive? yes you heard me right, there’s a brand new graphics card with AGP interface very much alive in the market.

Fact is, there’s still one or two motherboard manufacturers that still consider manufacturing AGP boards, one even combined it with Intel’s Socket 775. There is still so many people who haven’t upgraded to a PCI-E system because to them, the old one is still usable plus the cost of having to upgrade the entire system just to accomodate for one new PCI-E interface, very costly huh!

Fear not my dear readers, for Sapphire, the one company that have made an effort to give us AGP users a flavour of current graphics technology has offered two cards which is based on AMD’s 3000 series of GPUs; the HD3650 and the HD3850.

Furthermore, they have even make it’s clocks sligthly faster than standard. It’s core clock has a speed of 700MHz, 30MHz over the reference design, while the 512MB of GDDR3 memory works nicely at 846MHz, increased over the standard’s 825MHz. Plus, all features of the equivalent PCI-E are present including 320 stream processors, 512-bit internal memory ring, support for shader model 4.0 and DirectX 10.1. The GPU also features ATI’s PowerPlay, the technology which reduces power consumption depending on what the card is doing.

Thing’s though, we can’t record HD through the bus because there’s no enough bandwith with AGP, but this has nothing to do with the card itself. The AGP version is a single slot cooled design with a passive heat-sink over the voltage regulators, built on a blue PCB with a matching blue color.

The card uses an eight-pin PCI-E power connector but the standard six-pin connector will supply enough voltage but nonetheless Sapphire bundles a four-pin Molex to six-pin adaptor in case you haven’t got either. Performance-wise, based on tests on 3DMark05 and 06 Sapphire’s HD3850 is the fastest AGP card on the block with scores ranged up to 7,200 and 2,210 at 1,024 by 768-pixel resolution.

Congratulations to Sapphire for not forgetting us who still own and use AGP-based system.

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The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment – taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR™ — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices

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The new GeForce 8800 GT is an entirely new GPU core. The NVIDIA G92 GPU core that is under the hood of the new GeForce 8800 GT is essentially a die-shrink and cut back of the NVIDIA’s G8 architecture, with a few enhancements and optimizations. With this migration to TSMC’s 65nm process technology, the new GeForce 8800 GT is targeted at offering solid mid-range performance, lower power consumption and heat, along with a competitive price. The GPU is made on a 65nm process, based on the G80 of the 8800 GTS/GTX/Ultra. The graphic card is set to replace the 8800 GTS 320 MB which will be phased out soon (the 640 MB version will stay for now). A 65nm process allowed NVIDIA to manufacture the chip cheaper, with less heat output and to add additional features. NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT sits in the middle of the 8800-series with a single slot configuration that uses 100 Watts less power than the top of the range model, but with a lower clock speed and six less “stream processors.” It’s a fair bit higher spec than the GTX and GTS models, with the same “stream processor” clock speed as the Ultra at 1500MHz, and a memory frequency of 900MHz. It also supports PCIe 2.0 and the PureVideo HD engine which offloads H.264 encoding onto the GPU. This should increase performance in modern games which use a lot of shaders. So gamers, what are you waiting for.

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