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All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors
Pentium 4 system saved by HD 3850 AGP card
Product: PowerColor HD 3850 AGP 512MB
Estimated price: ?199 (about £150)
Website:
www.powercolor.com
WITH PCI EXPRESS having become the standard for graphics cards over the past years ? we could hardly believe our ears when ATI partners started announcing they were doing their own AGP thing with the HD 3850. We immediately bummed a card and as sure as eggs the delivery guy was knocking at our door a couple of weeks later ? the delay justified by “driver development”.
But “an AGP card?” you ask. We’ve got good reason to: late last year we retired an aging Pentium 4 machine, long past its glory days (if ever it had one, it was a Pentium 4 after all...) and now, low and behold, PowerColor springs this surprise on the world, saving AGP graphics from extinction with the very surprising HD 3850 PCS AGP 512MB.
The Rebirth
“Ole faithful” is a Pentium 4 3.2GHz Northwood core on an Asus P4S800D (nothing special here), with 1GB of DDR400 a Radeon 9700 Pro and 2x120GB SATA (RAID 0) drives ? all of this running Windows XP Pro SP2 (read below to find out why). In its prime, it was about as good as it got in the Intel camp and, in some nostalgic sense; it’s still a pretty decent rig. It’s over four years old by now and the dated Radeon 9700 Pro is noisy as always and barely able to keep up any decent framerates in modern games. If not for this new card, this PC would have been put out of its misery at a recycling station or donated to our fave school.
The Culprit
The card is pretty spacious, being way bigger than your standard AGP card. It has a PEG hanging off the end of the card to boot, so make way for some serious piece of graphics silicon. Since we’re talking a 6-pin PEG, and considering that most AGP machines don’t have “modern” power supplies, PowerColor did remember to include the necessary adapter so you can stick a molex plug on the other end.
The contents of the box itself are a simple cables+driver disk+GPU affair, no real extras, no fancy stuff, just what you’d expect in a fast upgrade card. Also, bringing the RV670 down to the ancient AGP bus required a bit of Rialto bridge magic. Yeah, the same chip that was launched over two years ago when ATI started making native PCIe cards and adapting them to the AGP interface. It’s on the back, just between the GPU and the golden fingers. The two DVI plugs you’re presented with can dual-link, allowing you to bring 2560x1600 joy to your desktop. Getting down to the specs, the PowerColor HD 3850 PCS AGP is a 512MB GDDR3 card that rocks to the sweet tune of 668MHz/828MHz (x2 on a 256-bit memory interface). This is all cooled down by a ZEROTherm all-copper fan and a copper plate slapped on the RAM chips playing the part of a heatspreader.
The Setup
Installing the card is a cinch, just pop out the old one, pop in the new one.
It’s big, but it’ll fit your rig if you can move stuff around inside ? you might
need to be careful with the DIMM slot latches as they used to come very close to
the card plane. The ZEROTherm cooler and copper ramsink seem overkill for this
card, but the end result is very worthwhile and it’ll even give the card with
some overclocking headroom.
Getting to the software, this is where we hit a big “BUT” in the review. For all intents and purposes, PowerColor packed a driver and Catalyst Control Cent er. It IS an older version of CCC, so if you have an old ATI card with a modern CCC, you’ll have to uninstall the older-but-newer first. If not, you get a clean, simple and quick install of the CCC with all the added benefits, BUT the driver itself is XP only ? yes, no Vista support so far. This also means no DirectX10.1 out of the box (well DX10.1 on the PCIe HD3850 hasn’t been quite as gobsmacking as expected, so it isn’t that big a loss).
The only other real nag with the driver installation was that once the HDMI Audio Out feature was activated, it automatically redirected your audio without some much as a “thank you, sir” ? so you have to go to your sound devices and reselect your output.
The Overclock
PowerColor was nice enough to bring not only ATI’s latest generation of hardware but the software too. This means you get, out of the box, a fully featured ATI Catalyst Control Panel with all the tricks. Since the 55nm RV670 comes clocked in at 670MHz, a little AMD OverDrive magic is used to automatically take the GPU a bit higher. 720MHz/929MHz were the new settings after the test ? and that was without any real fine-tuning or exotic cooling. Although +50MHz/+100MHz doesn’t sound like much, and with the CPU limitations weighing in the balance, it’ll just help with AA and AF rather than pushing a higher framerate in your games. The ZEROTherm fan+sinks does a great job of keeping the card cool, through and through. OverDrive auto-tunes but doesn’t register the upped frequencies where it should ? we had to pull out a couple of other apps in order to ascertain if it was so... and it was.
Performance
Gaming performance on an aging Pentium 4 platform is nowhere close to current
gaming systems: you’ve got that fabulous Netburst Microarchitecture that despite
its high clock, fell behind Athlon when it came to FPU performance. Let’s not
even get into comparisons with Core or Athlon 64 levels.
Our rig scored a healthy (albeit CPU-castrated) score in 3DMark ’06 as you can see below.
Come GR:AW2, we met with a pretty good performance. GR:AW2 delivers some punishment to our card ? as we could hear it rev up the fan to the max while playing, although temps never reached anything over 58 celsius.
World in Conflict is a serious piece of graphics candy in the RTS genre. We ran its internal benchmark in medium settings, at 3 different resolutions. Very playable too...
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance is one of the most CPU-demanding benchmarks on the market, and a challenge for our aging Pentium 4. For what it’s worth, it produced a composite score of 14384 with an average framerate of 25.99fps @1024x768 High Quality. We looked this up online and found that it was in line with 3.4GHz Prescotts (1MB cache) running PCIe HD 3850s, so the PCIe-to-AGP isn’t presenting a real problem here.
The Verdict
So what do we have here? On the one hand, there are no Vista drivers. We don’t
expect many AGP-ridden users to be upgrading to Vista when they can keep on
working with XP without the resource/performance hit. On the other hand, until
the Vole creates a DX10 release for XP ? (hell... freeze... over...) what’s the
real advantage in owning such a card? Well, brute force performance alone in
DirectX 9 titles.
The question remains, however. If you have an ailing AGP system, should you buy this card or not? Well, if you have no plans on buying a new PC until the end of the year, we’d say the HD 3850 PCS AGP 512MB is a sure bet ? it’ll get you up and playing the current generation of games at resolutions and image quality you’ve never experienced before on your system. It’s a tad bit expensive, though ? and you don’t get much out of the box, software-wise.
Just remember, this is about all ATI’s partners can do to improve your performance, short of you going out and buying a modern PC. The HD 3850 AGP gives your midget Pentium something to stand on in a world of Core2/Athlon/Phenom giants. If you are one of the latter, do not mock the 3850 on AGP, it scores 900% better than our old Geforce FX5900 and almost 800% better than our Radeon 9700Pro. You can rest assured your AGP rig has a year's worth of gaming left in it.
The Good
Enough performance to play today’s games, ZeroTherm fan is way better than your
old AGP dustbusters, HDMI with HD Audio out.
The Bad
Big card, pricey.
The Ugly
No Vista / DX10 support.
Bartender's Verdict
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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.
I'd seriously have put "No Vista support" under the Good category. :)
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.
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!!!
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.
what do you mean no Vista support? Vista Cat 8.2's work just fine with this 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Found one in a Acer desktop (with the SLI connector!:)
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?
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. :)
listed on geizhals price search engine..

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

:)
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.

:)
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.
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.
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.
Whopping fast, but it's been poorly realized drivers
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.
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
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.
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.
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 !