Many people out there in the gaming community have an older computer between two and five years old. If you are like me and most of my compatriots, this computer is a machine that you built assembled with your own two hands. Thus not only do you know this system’s ins and outs, you possibly have also developed some form of sentimental connection to the little assortment of carbon and silicon.
With the release of Crysis many gamers, including myself, began to take for granted the system which had provided them with hundreds of hours of Unreal Tournament 2004 gaming pleasure. Well I am here to say its time to dust off “Old Faithful” and “Extend the Life” of your creation.
Two words: AGP and ATI.
With the advent of faster memory and PCI buses, new motherboards and the majority of next generation VGA cards have moved to PCI Express interfaces. Like many of you the prospect of changing motherboards would create many compatibility issues between components. Excluding hard disk drives and optical media drives, a new motherboard would need a new CPU, new memory modules(DDR2/DDR3), and possibly a higher wattage and amperage power supply. These expenditures have the ability to be rather cheap but being gamers we probably would not purchase sub par components.
Enter ATI (AMD Graphics Product Group). They were purchased by AMD in 2006 with the intention to provide onboard ATI graphics accelerators for motherboards built for AMD processors. This was done to decrease the number of motherboards with onboard Intel graphics chips and thus transfer some of that revenue to AMD.
ATI, unlike Nvidia have not completely abandoned AGP. Many ATI graphics chipsets are currently being modified for AGP motherboards. Third party companies such as Powercolor and Sapphire are taking PCI-Express graphics chipsets and placing them on AGP interface board, giving older computers the capability to play Crisis on “low” settings. What that means for you and I is that we can go another year or two without the need to build another computer. This is the route that I have taken.
Recently, less than a week ago, I went to Newegg to puchase one of these new PCI-Express made for AGP graphics cards. Since I had just exhausted the majority of my personal tech fund on home theater components, I was in the market for something cheap. So I perused Newegg’s open box section for deals. I came across two cards that caught my eye: ATI Radeon X1650 and ATI HD2600. After verifying with my updated drivers that my current ATI Radeon 9550 was the equivalent of an x1050, I decided either of those two cards would provide the significant boost my system deserved. I did a little comparison research and found that the HD2600 was a somewhat faster card. My next choice was do I purchase the Powercolor.
I bought the PowerColor for $15 dollars less. Big mistake. Bear in mind I did also ignore the more than 300 negative reviews by newegg customers. I knew thought I was technical enough to avoid the same problems everyone else was having. Well I experienced every single problem the customers commented about and some. The card gave my normally very stable Windows XP Professional machine back to back bsod’s(Blue Screens of Death). The card also appeared to be locked in an overclocked state running at nearly 100mhz more than stated in the specifications as reproted by ATI Catalyst program. My received card also had the error of only reporting 256mb instead of 512mb for its GDDR2. The bios flash utility provided by powercolor continuously caused my system to hang before rebooting itself and reporting “Windows has recovered from a critical error” dialog. One final problem with this card is that it also had task manager reporting my CPU was being 45%-50% utilized while idle. After sharing my horror story with the Techpedition staff I discovered that some of them had also experienced these same problems with the same chipset but different third party. We discovered that the HD 2600 has problems and should be avoided for AGP interface.
Well I RMAed the 2600 and bit the bullet and purchased a Sapphire ATI HD 3850. This is currently the fasted GPU available for AGP. My system is stable and I can play Left 4 Dead at a much higher resolution than the 640×480 that my old card gave me. All my current games now run silky smooth with all max settings on at 1680×1050(22in LCD) at 60fps. I am very pleased. The Biohazard(my computer’s name) is still in the game.
Be careful however. I must warn you that AGP cards with PCI-Express graphics chips come at a hefty premium. Sometimes 2x the price of its PCI-Express counterpart. But still less than an entirely new system. Sentimental value my friends, hold on to “Old Faithful”, he/she is not out of the game yet.
