x1950 Pro AGP....am I wasting my money??

CF perf scaling is vastly improved for R600 gen products. This was seen even with launch drivers.

 

The most wasteful part of AGP cards these days is their artificial price inflation over their PCIe equivs from being "low volume" or some such.

If you want to run something like say Supreme Commander, a new video card will do little for you. CPU most definitely makes a difference. I have a 7800 Go GTX in my Dell 9300 that I upgraded to from a plain 6800 Go. SupCom runs better until there's actually any action going on, and then the Pentium M 2.13 pukes. Same with Oblivion, tho much less so.

So honestly, I'd wait until you can do a full overhaul. Otherwise you'll only get part of the benefit of an upgrade. Or in Sup Com's case, no benefit.

 

Also using the bridge chip (Rialto) and having to accommodate for it both in terms of board layout and additional cooling add to the cost significantly, or so it seems.

 

The bridge chip on my X1950Pro is on the back of the card, and has no cooling.

Jawed

 

The bridge chip on my G71-powered AGP card is on the front and is covered by the full-card-sized cooler. It gets ridiculously hot, however it puts up with AGP speeds as high as 89mhz with perfect stability in my testing.

Dunno how ATI's bridge chip does with AGP overclocking, but I was quite impressed with this.

 

I'm pretty happy with my upgrade from an x800xt to the x1950pro agp in my a64 3500 system. I got to play Bioshock with decent framerate, and it should play HL2 orange box ok. This should take me well into next year before needing a full system upgrade.