AGP Upgrade advice

[Kerotan]

I recently came into possession of some free (but slightly ancient) PC hardware, but still it's better than what I had before! Basically I got an old socket 370 mobo, with a slow celeron, a 20Gb HDD, 768Mb of slow SDR RAM + an ATi Rage 128 of some description, as well as a case which I'm junking and putting the components in an Antec 900 (I think the description of a Ferrari with a moped engine is appropriate here...)

Anyway I plan on replacing the celeron with a PIII cos they're only about £10 off ebay for ~1.3GHz and I'm hoping this will last me till I do a proper upgrade when it's my birthday in summer. The mobo is pretty ancient, I think about 1999 era so I was wondering if an AGP card which is listed as AGP8X would be backwards compatible with a 4X (or even 2X) slot?, I'm not sure what speed the AGP slot is rated for.

I've got a decent Corsair HX520, so powering a card is no problem, and I can either get a 7600GT for about £45 or a 6200 for ~£20. I'm guessing a PIII would cause serious CPU bottleneck so I might as well just stick with a 6200? What do you guys reckon?

Thanks for any advice.

 

[Rastalovich]

All said and done, what u gonna do with this pc ?

 

[Kerotan]

lol well i was jus lookin to play a few games casually such as Mafia, CS 1.6, Deus Ex (i.e. old games lol) + do a bit of music editing, I'm not looking to get a serious gaming rig till all the new intel chipsets land around june time, and after I've finished my A-levels.

 

[ali_james]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Graphics_Port#Versions_of_AGP

Basically some old AGP slots are something like 3 volts. Which will blow up some modern cards (or they just won't fit), I think it's explained well enough in the link, just a case of seeing what you've got on your board. Good luck

Cheers!

EDIT: A card like a 6600 gt or 6800 gs should easily do the job for playing the kind of games your looking at, likely you could pick one up around £30 on ebay

 

[Rastalovich]

I played DeusEx with a 6600GT on some K7 board. Should be a walk for a 7600.

 

[Kerotan]

Thanks for the link ali_james it was really helpful, I figured out that my mobo only supports the 3.3V signalling, so unfortunatley that limits my choices to, at the most modern, cards from the FX series from nVidia and Radeon 9xxx series for ATi. I think seeing as how the 9800Pro can be had quite cheap now, I might just go for that, it will serve me well for a few months, and I've heard most GeForce FX cards are pretty awful, as well as gpureview showing the 9800 blitzing anything similar from the Green Team. Thanks all for your advice.

 

[Mr. Smith]

Sounds like you can't use it but the 3850 has just been released in AGP flavour...

 

[Kerotan]

Yeah they're pretty pricey and as you've said, not compatible, ended up getting a 9800PRO 256MB off ebay for £26. Should be here next week

 

[The Computer Council]

I used to have the ATI x1650Pro AGP which performed very well on my Sempron system (at the time). Would happily run Bioshock - while it wasn't the highest framerate in the world, it did play at a more than enjoyable level, and they're about £35 now.

 

[Kerotan]

Well, big changes have occurred in the last week or so, I was able to pick up a Athlon XP 2500+ Barton with an AsRock K7NF2-RAID mobo for next to nothing, so just waiting for them to arrive. I have the 9800 PRO on my desk now, but as soon as I get it setup I'm gonna use it for a couple of weeks, then sell it again on ebay and try to break even or push for a profit. I looked into X1650Pro, but it gets caned by the 7600GT. I realised that my original plan of an nVidia 7-series card is probably a sound bet, and I'm looking to either a 7600GT or a 7900GS, which atm is only gonna cost me ~£10 more than the GT. Gonna run my 2 SATA 160Gb HDDs in RAID 0 to try + make up some of the perfomance gap from the older components, and probably get one of the Thermaltake Volcano coolers to keep the Athlon good for an OC. I might do some sort of project log? Although it's not really a proper project lol, just my first build if you discount the Celeron. I'll post some pics anyway when it's all running.

 

[Bungral]

Yeah get some pics up.. We like piccies!!!