Will this be a bottleneck?

[SK-1]

I was looking at the x1950 pro AGP for the wifes PC,...but will the P4 2.66 be a bottleneck?
I have an ATI 9700pro in there now but BF2 is looking ugly and I do not even want to try 2142!

 

[Chewy]

yep it would be my p4 3.0 was with me.. than again it could of been my 420watt enermax silencer psu.. oh btw it was with my 1900gt stock.. humm sorry I cant answer this for you lol it could of even been my p4 bottlenecking my game... well I couldnt play hl2 maxed at alll untill I upgraded my pc to c2d.

 

[Kursah]

I was looking at the x1950 pro AGP for the wifes PC,...but will the P4 2.66 be a bottleneck?
I have an ATI 9700pro in there now but BF2 is looking ugly and I do not even want to try 2142!

That older P4 will cause a bottleneck as-well-as the whole system. But that card will still do wonders for you as far as graphics and gaming. The memory bus, speed, efficiency and same for CPU and how the dynamics of your system is as compared to a newer system will cause a full system bottleneck so-to-say, but crank up the visuals and stress your GPU more than your CPU and you should be okay, and quite content. There's really nothing you can do short of replacing your system to alleviate this issue, but that doesn't mean you won't see the benefits of the card by any means. When I upgraded from a 9600pro agp to an x850 pro agp in my old P4 775 system, it was amazing how much faster my graphics performance was...and I could crank just about everything up...and the x1950pro is about twice as fast as my modded x850pro to xt pe, so you WILL see some good performance gains and nice eye candy! That's a healthy card for AGP, I love my PCIe version...mine doesn't OC well, but it works very, very well.

 

[Chewy]

would an agp card give you lower framerates than a pci-e? Im just wondering.

 

[Kursah]

That depends...but from what I've seen and read in comparisons, the difference is smaller between similar cards than the industry wants you to think. The x1950pro agp vs pci-e is actually pretty damn close in comparisons. And I've read that people have had good performance increase with the x1950pro agp's increasing the AGP bus 2-3mhz! I noticed nothing when increasing my PCIe bus!

I had a buddy who had an x850xt pe pcie card and I had my x850pro agp modded to 16p, xt-pe...and I was only about 5fps average behind him, at most 12fps, and closer to the 5 or less range! The game we used was NFS - Most Wanted + Fraps, did the same race, same settings, resolution, close to same specs (aside from his DDR2 and my DDR1).

 

[pt]

would an agp card give you lower framerates than a pci-e? Im just wondering.

just a couple less, nothing notorious

 

[Chewy]

cool thanks for the info, sorry for changing the subject.

 

[SK-1]

That older P4 will cause a bottleneck as-well-as the whole system. But that card will still do wonders for you as far as graphics and gaming. The memory bus, speed, efficiency and same for CPU and how the dynamics of your system is as compared to a newer system will cause a full system bottleneck so-to-say, but crank up the visuals and stress your GPU more than your CPU and you should be okay, and quite content. There's really nothing you can do short of replacing your system to alleviate this issue, but that doesn't mean you won't see the benefits of the card by any means. When I upgraded from a 9600pro agp to an x850 pro agp in my old P4 775 system, it was amazing how much faster my graphics performance was...and I could crank just about everything up...and the x1950pro is about twice as fast as my modded x850pro to xt pe, so you WILL see some good performance gains and nice eye candy! That's a healthy card for AGP, I love my PCIe version...mine doesn't OC well, but it works very, very well.

Thank you for the post.I think I will give it a go!

 

[Kursah]

Enjoy!

Thank you for the post.I think I will give it a go!

You'll be very happy with the improvement, you won't believe there is a bottleneck at first! That is until you run 3DMark and compare! But who cares as long as you can crank up the eye candy and resolutions and enjoy nice and smooth gaming? Enjoy!! Glad I could help!

 

[ARTOSOFT]

That depends...but from what I've seen and read in comparisons, the difference is smaller between similar cards than the industry wants you to think. The x1950pro agp vs pci-e is actually pretty damn close in comparisons. And I've read that people have had good performance increase with the x1950pro agp's increasing the AGP bus 2-3mhz! I noticed nothing when increasing my PCIe bus!

I had a buddy who had an x850xt pe pcie card and I had my x850pro agp modded to 16p, xt-pe...and I was only about 5fps average behind him, at most 12fps, and closer to the 5 or less range! The game we used was NFS - Most Wanted + Fraps, did the same race, same settings, resolution, close to same specs (aside from his DDR2 and my DDR1).

IIRC, the agp version use something like AGP to pcie bridge converter chip to translate AGP to native pcie GPU processor. So, I am thinking AGP version should be slower than pcie since you need translator for it to work.

Regards,
Arto.

 

[Batou1986]

nope theres less than a 1fps difference in all games on the 1950pro agp vs pci-e ati's rilato chip does a good job at that i dont know about nvidia

 

[ex_reven]

Id say it'll bottleneck. But it will still offer better gaming than what you have now.
Your pretty much limited by the bus speed, cpu and ram.

Maybe in more graphics intensive gaming moments you will suffer slowdowns at points where alot of rendering occurs (high draw distance maps/ lots of dynamic entities or physics objects). Since the GPU will be churning out more than the CPU can process in these stages of a game. Its hard to say...But I dont see it as too much of a problem for the majority of games.

 

[Kursah]

IIRC, the agp version use something like AGP to pcie bridge converter chip to translate AGP to native pcie GPU processor. So, I am thinking AGP version should be slower than pcie since you need translator for it to work.

Regards,
Arto.

Which is why ATI's Rialto chip is so damn good! Read an article of x1950pro AGP vs PCIe, the differences are very close! That is why I stated what I did, because I read the results I found on issues when I had an AGP system and purchased my x850 for it, even back then the results were close! At least on ATI's side, I didn't read up much on the Nvidia counterparts. His system will cause a bottleneck situation, but it will still see a good performance jump in graphics that will probably cause some great excitement as my x850 did over my 9600!