In correction to my earlier comment my motherboard is made by Biostar, not Intel as I earlier stated. Long live AGP!!! lol

Im running a Northwood P4 2.54 overclocked to 2.85GHz (soon getting northwood 3.4GHz chip) and 2 gigs of OCZ DDR1 ram and Nvidia GeForce 7800gs. I was wondering what the sapphire or a similar model ATI 3850 card on my pc will do compared to my faithful Nvidia 7800GS card. I can run HD in 720P and I play most of my games in full 1280x1024 rez. Sometimes my hd skips and games framerates come and go as I move around. I am not sure of my motherboard model but it is made by intel and supports agp 8x and my power supply unit is 390 watts. I really cant afford a faster pc at this time but I may be able to help this one make it for a few more years.

In answer to Dale Beshears question. To run games with directX10 inhancements you'll need to upgrade your XP to vista. 32 bit is fine but it has to be vista or the new windows 7. XP carn't do DX10. But to be honist you arnt missing much by running games in DX9.0c. I have 2 pcs my sons running vista & a cupple of games in DX10 & my older xp system all in DX9.0c hardly look any different ! Most games dont run in DX10 anyway. Oh & running DX10 through an agp card. Maybe asking a bit much !

I recently upgraded my old pc. P4 3.0,Asus P4C800-Delux,HD2600xt,160gig sata,2gig kingston DDR3200,XP pro.

The cpu & graphics card had to be replaced. I wanted to get my 4 year old pc upto speed to run todays games such as cod 4 & crysis. Tall order but i'm quite happy with the results.

The P4 3.0 was removed & replaced with a second hand P4 3.4 (Top cpu for this mobo £46 ebay). The agp sapphire HD2600xt had to go as well even though it was only just over a year old it wasnt really upto running cod 4 ! That was replaced with a brand new agp sapphire HD3850(£98).
After tinkering with the mobo bios & graphics card drivers & got the cpu running stable @ 3.76/222fsb. The graphics card is also overclocked a tad.

The cost of my upgrades was £144 i did get abit back on selling the old cpu & gpu mind. Money well spent it seems. Cod 4 & crysis both run smooth @ 1280x1024 high settings (Not so smooth with extra settings mind !)3DMARK2001se Scores
Before = 18500 After = 25300

Be warned !!! The AGP HD3850 needs a fairly powerful cpu to run it. Minimum cpu P4 3.2 Prescott or Amd XP3200.

I thought DirectX10 couldn't run under Windows XP. How is this possible? I plan to get one of these cards... and I am running Windows XP SP3 32-Bit. Do you have to upgrade to the 64 bit version of Windows to use DirectX10? Thanks for any input that anyone can give me about this.

Cheers Pilgrim - I have the same set up as you. Bought this card today, should see me through until I get myself a new rig

HD3850 AGPx8

I realise that this article is a year old but I recently bought one of these cards for about half the original price.
Also while I am still on XP-SP3 I am now running DirectX10.
I have the GPU and Memory on the card clocked at their upper limits without problems and the system CPU is a D945 clocked at 3.73GHZ.
The MB is Asus P5P800-VM with 4GB DDR400 ram.
This is the best addition I have made since I built the PC 3 years ago.
Highly recommended for anyone who cannot use PCI Express.

Whopping fast, but it's been poorly realized drivers

I returned the HD3850 agp for a money back, it was fast, but it didn't play too games so i had to return it. all of the Liquid entertainment games such as battle realms, dragonshards and Neverwintwer nights 1 played like 100 times slower, i mean really slow for many games, something is wrong with the DirectX 10 supporting vidoe cards. they do not do well on many DX9 games. so there

I want DX9 only supporting cards.

i can't live without dragonshards and few others.

So I bought this recently for my aging Althon. Plugged in, connected the extra PCIe power cable - no picture, even the card's cooler didn't start. Unplugged the PCIe cable - at least some progress - card's cooler started. Still no picture.

But my power supply unit posts only low 300W. The card manual asks for at least 450W ATX 2.2. ATX 2.2, aka 24pin mainboard supply cable. This is a relatively new standard to accomodate precisely for PCIe cards. Such mainboards do not have AGP slots. A mistake maybe?

Hoping that just upgrading the power supply will fix it.

ok People this card works better on vista and not XP (at least the one I got the HIS version) the XP driver that came with this didnt work at all I couldnt play nor watch any videos. But yes this card works with vista and works well.

My previous comment wasn't correct. the 3850 does have an HDMI out feature like its 3650 brother via DVI-to-HDMI adapters (but this wasn't included in powercolor'sdescription on its website.)

the 3850 require a 6pin pcie power connector while the 3650 needs the regular 4pin molex similar to the ones used by IDE optical drives. 

I guess the confusion for me was these AGP GPU's having different power connetor requirements.

:)

May I know how you were able to have and/or activate the HDMI on this card?

According to PowerColor's website as indicated below:

http://www.powercolor.com/Global/products_comparsion_Details.asp

the 3850 DOESN'T have an HDMI output while its brother 3650 has 1. In this sense, IMHO, the 3650 is a better option as could connect to any A/V receiver with an HDMI.

Based on pictures posted on newegg.com, the 3850 is longer than the 3650 because of its 6-pin PCI-E power connector slot. Does this feature make it more flexible, i.e. AGP 4x/8x and PCI-E capable? 

Thanks. 

:)

I see that there are still people who find the 3dmark03 score interesting. Okay student, here it is; 33798 for the great 3850AGP@720/939 with E6600@2600Mhz

This card is really superb. It somewhat a waste to put it on a P4 Motherboard. I get 9700 3dmarks06 with a E6600@2600Mhz and the 3850 overclocked to 720/930 !! Now this is nice for an old AGP bus isn't it? (b.t.w. there's no difference between AGP4x and AGP8x, so this bus still works fine with single cards...)

There were vista drivers available a day before this article was written (according to the official page on where you will find the drivers for this card). Just want to point out that fact is false!!

listed on geizhals price search engine..

http://geizhals.at/eu/a302818.html

arctic89, "though i'll wait for powercolor, gecube, visiontek version because they have better cooling for it"
And Sapphire is already slightly overclocked.. I think, it's cooling is not that bad. :)

Hmm, My faithful DFI Lanparty UT nF3 with a Sempron 2800+, overclocked to 2800 MHz, with 2 gb RAM, and a Gainward Bliss 7800 GS+ (yes, the 7900 GTX chip with castrated 512 MB DDR3 memory) overclocked to the proper GTX specs scored little more than 18500 3dMark'03 points, and I could play Oblivion comfortably at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 8xAF with all details on maximum settings less HDR. What would that 3850 baby do to it?

Found one in a Acer desktop (with the SLI connector!:)

I think that any Athlon 64 would be good enough especially if you have some brain for overclocking, Even one core AMD would deal with the gaming staff better than in the current test..And also 
2gb of RAM highly recommended, which ithink is not such rear thing for old platforms

Hi,
I bought this card to replace my Radeon 1650. No need to say that once I fired up the games, it put a BIG smile on my face. This is definately worth it for all who have rather fast CPU (case of me with AMD X2 4200). All you need is 2Gb of memory and you are good to go. I think I am good for next one year. I am casual gamer and do not need HQ at 1900x1200 with 4AA and 16AF ;-) to enjoy a game. I have X360 and the games on PC looks great with this card.Tested with Gears of War at 1024res.
Vista support ? you are kidding! Even MS would like to get rid of Vista. XP rocks.

I've been hoping to pick up one of these since they announced it would support agp... but where in the world can I buy one? all the vendors I check only have the pcix version.

found one in the US http://www.excaliberpc.com/Sapphire_Radeon_HD_3850_512MB_256-Bit/100228L/partinfo-id-584979.html

though i'll wait for powercolor, gecube, visiontek version because they have better cooling for it...

The 3850 is a good card, no doubt here. But does it make sense (from a financial perspective) to upgrade an older system with this fast card? As your WiC benchmark shows, the minimum fps are extremely low, that is a clear sign for CPU limitation. 

I would suggest a 3850 agp for a socket 939 system with a 4200+ dual core, but in any older system a smaller and cheaper card will be enough to take it to its limits. I'd rather save the money for a complete upgrade including motherboard, cpu, ram and a relatively cheaper PCIe card.

This should be great with the Opteron 275HE(an old Dual Core), running FSB adjusted 2.32MHz, I think. Agreat initiative - I have to get one.

what do you mean no Vista support? Vista Cat 8.2's work just fine with this card.

There are lots of people out there who have Socket 754 AGP systems or even Socket 939 AGP systems. 

An AMD CPU platform benchmark would also have been better.

Powercolor is not the only one to release an AGP HD3850.
Gecube, Sapphire and Visiontek have also announced them.
As for the price, the Gecube one will be around £120-£130 range, and comes with double slot exhaust cooler.
Also Powercolor have confirmed that the shipped drivers have bugs and not up to scratch performance. ATI announced official HD3850 AGP support in Catalyst 8.2
Also ebuyer is expected to have the cards in stock around 22nd Febuary, but only Powercolor and Gecube.
Thumbs up to Inquirer for bringing this review. 5 STARS!!!

Hi, great article.
I was hopping also to see this card working on Vista because of DX 10 and DX 10.1. With no drivers yet for this OS this card it's only good for XP users with DX9 wich is ridiculous knowing the card also supports DX10 and 10.1.

Let's hope that ATI final drivers for Vista will support this card as well.

By far the best AGP out until today.

Keep the good reviews coming.

I'd seriously have put "No Vista support" under the Good category. :)

The 3850 fully accelerates VC-1 and H.264, so if you're running a pentium 4 based home theatre PC, with an OEM version of XP it's cheaper to buy a new AGP card than a new motherboard,CPU, graphics card, memory and another copy of XP/VIsta.

Of course, the real question is whether the AGP drivers support VC-1/H.264, and the article is rather inadequate on that front. I'd be dubious about driver quality if they're not even bothering to support Vista.

It'd also be interesting to know how quality compares to Nvidia, as current wisdom appears to be that Nvidia's offerings have higher CPU utilisation, but better DVD/HD video quality.