One of the issues with reviewing an AGP card is there are so few AGP video cards in this category available to test. The second problem is the fact that the last AGP motherboards came around 5 years ago with the advent of the PCI Express standard and therefore the CPU and video cards of this time and age aren't even close to the same standard as back then.
While digging through Thrasher2's stash he found an AGP motherboard with a LGA-775 interface, the ASRock 775DUAL-VSTA which supports the X6800 Extreme Edition CPU from Intel. He also found 2GB of DDR-550. Obviously the average person with an AGP motherboard would have a different setup, but we wanted as modern a system as possible. An 800W PSU was used for powering this computer. One thing I could not do was compare the 6800 or the 7900GS to the GIGABYTE card in Crysis Warhead due to it being DirectX 10.0. I used the Mainstream setting as the Enthusiast setting was too intensive for this system.
Test System
- ASROCK 775DUAL-VSTA motherboard running latest drivers off ASRock's site
- WD 74GB Raptor SATA HDD in IDE mode
- Intel X6800 Extreme Edition CPU running at 2.93GHz
- 2GB Corsair DDR550MHz running 400MHz
- GIGABYTE GV-R465D2-1GI video card running Catalyst 8.62 (Beta Catalyst 9.6 on Gigabyte's website)
- Thermaltake CPU Cooler
- Windows Vista with SP1 installed
Tests
- Left 4 Dead 1280x1024
- Enemy Territory Quake Wars Patch 1280x1024
- Unreal Tournament 3 Patch 1.5 1280x1024
- 3DMark06
- Crysis Warhead 1280x1024 mainstream setting GIGABYTE GV-R465D2-1GI only
