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Pentium 4 system saved by HD 3850 AGP card

Comments

The advantage is HD acceleration

The 3850 fully accelerates VC-1 and H.264, so if you're running a pentium 4 based home theatre PC, with an OEM version of XP it's cheaper to buy a new AGP card than a new motherboard,CPU, graphics card, memory and another copy of XP/VIsta.

Of course, the real question is whether the AGP drivers support VC-1/H.264, and the article is rather inadequate on that front. I'd be dubious about driver quality if they're not even bothering to support Vista.

It'd also be interesting to know how quality compares to Nvidia, as current wisdom appears to be that Nvidia's offerings have higher CPU utilisation, but better DVD/HD video quality.
posted by : Peter Kay, 14 February 2008

The Ugly?

I'd seriously have put "No Vista support" under the Good category. :)
posted by : azrael, 14 February 2008

No drivers for Vista, no DX10 for this AGP

Hi, great article.
I was hopping also to see this card working on Vista because of DX 10 and DX 10.1. With no drivers yet for this OS this card it's only good for XP users with DX9 wich is ridiculous knowing the card also supports DX10 and 10.1.

Let's hope that ATI final drivers for Vista will support this card as well.

By far the best AGP out until today.

Keep the good reviews coming.
posted by : Sérgio de Campos Azeredo, 14 February 2008

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