AGP Phased out of Latest Motherboards?

Z

Zaine

Veteran XV
I'm going to be doing a small upgrade this coming week and I can't seem to find a new motherboard with an AGP port (not surprising). Is there any decent motheboards out right now that support Socket 939 Athlon 64 X2 and AGP? Or will I need to find a PCI-Express graphics card to go with it? (In which case, I need something cheap and better then a Radeon 9800 Pro)
 
Meh, I use an MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum which is a native AGP board and I too have to use it in 4x to avoid bugs in certain apps. It doesn't hurt performance at all. It's just the way AGP is, which is part of the reason it's starting to disappear.
 
Alrighty. Just for the hell of it, do you know of any PCI-Express graphics cards within the 100-250 price range with a significant performance improvement over an agp radeon 9800 pro? If it's dirt cheap and just equal to the performance of my current card, i'm fine with it.. because i can spend more money on a decked mobo that is gonna last me the next few years, and I can worry about a really good pci-express card later.
 
I'm into OC'ing as long as I have guidance LOL.. i've dived into it with my current PC, putting little tweaks into the CPU and RAM, but I couldn't go very far, I think because the RAM throws a fit
 
You should take a look at the Epox 9NPA3 Ultra or the 9NPA+ Ultra for the mobo then. They're cheap, but reliable and OC well. Overclocking A64's is pretty easy anyway, and you can always set a divider on the RAM if it's pulling you back. Here's a pretty good guide.
 
Can't recommend them myself, but the +Ultra scored pretty good on Anandtech's OC competition (losing only to DFI IIRC).


They still have the 9NPA3 Ultra, which should be pretty much the same (save for the lack of integrated firewire and perhaps other minor features).

Note though that EpoX doesn't list the 3 as compatible with dual core CPUs. Then again, it doesn't list the + either, and it's fully compatible. You might want to do some research on this if you want to go dual core (and I see no reason why you wouldn't want to).
 
Yeah, the motherboard will probably be up in the air until Monday or so, because I hear AMD processor prices are gonna be going down, I may be able to get an AM2 socket type processor for a good price
 
If anyone finds any online retailers with cut prices on the AMD processers please post the links here. Hell, I'm even up to going for Conroe if you got it, since i'm not bothering with SLI.
 
thank you! anyone have any new recommendations for a motherboard, now that i'm going AM2 (also DDR2 RAM)?
 
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Conroe isn't really worth it, AMD lowered their prices so that they'd continue to have the best price for performance.

You can build a damn nice system for around $700 (with the video card), I'll choose the parts and update this post with a potential rig.

$560 Rig (Without HD and Burner)
DVD Burner - $30 (Removed)
Case w/ 400 watt PSU - $50
250gb WD HD 16mb cache - $70 (Removed)
Socket AM2 ECS nforce4 mobo - $60
256mb PowerColor X800GTO - $90
2gb G.Skill DDR2 800 RAM - $160
Athlon 64 X2 4200+ Windsor - $200

Might want to add $30 or so for a PSU as the ones that come with cases are usually shit. Any ATi card below the X1000 series won't have PS 3.0, so you may want to go with an X1600 (goes for $70 Open Box) or higher, though if new it'll cost more and possibly perform worse.
 
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