Aging AGP slot gets Radeon HD 4650

 

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Posted on 17 Aug 2009 at 10:47

We were surprised to discover that graphics card manufacturer Sapphire are launching an AGP version of ATI's HD Radeon 4650. The AGP graphics standard was superseded by PCI-Express x16 back in 2004. Some cards supporting the old standard have trickled out over the years, but we thought we'd seen the last of them.

The last AGP-equipped PCs we saw were back in April 2005 (Shopper 206). A number of our labs PCs that month had AGP motherboards. The typical PC that month had a 2.0GHz single-core AMD Athlon 64 3200+ processor and 512MB of RAM.

The HD 4650 is a current generation mid-range graphics card. With a PC like the one listed above, your processor will probably be a bigger bottleneck to games performance than the graphics card itself. In recent tests we found that performance in Crysis was seriously limited even by a modern 1.6GHz Celeron Dual Core processor, which is considerably more powerful than the one listed above. That said this card will let even an aging PC play many modern games at moderate detail settings.

In addition to games performance, it gives the ability to smoothly play HD video with its built-in hardware UVD decoder. It also allows users to accelerate tasks such as video transcoding (converting video formats to play on portable devices) and other new applications supporting ATI Stream technology.

The board has 2 DVI connectors and TV-out and is supplied with a variety of connectors to simplify use with any type of monitor. Display on an HDMI device such as flat screen TV is also supported with a dongle supplied, but due to limitations of the AGP bus, audio over HDMI is not supported. Supplementary power is required via a standard 6-pin connector. The vast majority of AGP-equipped PC owners will need to use the supplied 4-pin molex to 6-pin adapter cable.

The card will be available shortly for around £65 inc VAT. Images and more details are available at www.sapphiretech.com.

Author: Seth Barton