Quick Question regarding Video Cards

[Pirate_bob7]

Hi, new to the forums, I have a aprox. 5 year old dell that i have lightly upgraded over the years, for light gaming etc... Recently I have been wanting to upgrade the videocard once more in order for better gaming and performance while playing Battlefield 2. I was wondering if there is a major performance loss when running an AGP 8x/4x in a 4x slot or if it would run well. Well thanks in advance!

 

[eyeCpc]

You wouldn't see the full potential of any card selected while it should still perform reasonably. Video cards are designed to be backward compatible for replacing cards on older systems. An 8x/4x will also run in a 2x/1x AGP slot in order to get an even older system running.

With a 5yr. old Dell you can't expect much performance wise for newer games to begin with. While the primary purpose may not be for gaming the idea of upgrading into a newer faster system or better yet custom build would see a large contrast performance wise. Even a newer low end PCI-Express card will usually smoke right past AGP. Newer games are designed to take advantage of newer hardwares.

 

[Pirate_bob7]

yeah, no PCI-e slot or I woulda upgraded that years ago, lol. I'm probably gonna build a pc sometime in the near future.

 

[eyeCpc]

You can still get AGP cards at this time like the Radeon 2400 or 2600 Pro models. Those are much newer DX10 compatible models for the time being. I imagine you will waiting until the next build to upgrade from XP however.

 

[Redmo0n]

I think the best AGP card you can get is the 3850, which is almost equivalent to the 8800gt.

It would easily play battlefield 2.

 

[veg1992]

I think the best AGP card you can get is the 3850, which is almost equivalent to the 8800gt.

It would easily play battlefield 2.

It is...

2nd is - X1950XT
3rd is - X1950Pro
4th- 7950gt

All of those can play BF2 pretty well, actually even a HD 2600 pro/xt (also available in AGP) can play BF2

 

[eyeCpc]

You will only see so much being limited to an AGP card. But the newer AGP DX10 compatible cards even mid range models offer quite a bit more at this over the ATI 9000s and NVidia FX5200s abd 6000 series.

The main drawback of course will still be the older board seeing a 4x/2x slot, a much slower cpu, and the one things that helps in both XP and Vista alike is having a good 2gb of memory installed. What did that see new 256mb, 512mb?