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Old June 30th, 2008, 12:57 AM   Digg it!   #1 (permalink)
Prexaspes
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Join Date: Oct 2001
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Final AGP upgrade

My main computer is getting long in the tooth, but it needs to serve me a while longer, and I don't have a lot of time to play games, but do like the new games since they are so much more developed than my old favorites like Quake and Unreal. What I have now is a Pentium 4 3.2E Prescott core, 2GB DDR 400, Creative XFI Xtreme Audio, Netcell Revolution SP 5000 with 3 300GB SATA drives RAIDed, USB wireless network and an eVGA 7800GS CO Superclock vid card. I wanted to get as much hardware taking the processing off the CPU. After burning up one Antec power supply and crashing randomly with a generic 680 watt supply, I have a quad rail 750 watt Silverstone supply running.

I realize the Creative card doesn't offload, and I'm looking for a new wireless adapter. A CPU upgrade is almost out of the question, though I'm still on the fence about trying a Pentium M and seeing what I get.

Would I really benefit from an ATI 3850 AGP card? The 7800 gets the job done, sort of. It feels limited by the CPU, but I can't crank up the aniso and AA without taking a (substantial) performance loss. That says to me that the platform isn't completely at it's end for dishing out to the GPU.

How much does the 3850 offload as opposed to the 7800GS?
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