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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