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Sapphire shows AGP users some love with Radeon HD 4650

by Parm Mann on 13 August 2009, 10:09

Tags: HD 4650 AGP, Sapphire

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Having become accustomed to PCI Express, we'd almost forgotten about the good ol' Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP).

We're certain most of our readers have moved on (and if you haven't, shame on you), but Sapphire tells us that AGP graphics cards continue to sell well throughout Europe. That sounds like an opportunity, and it's hoping to take full advantage with this:

That's AMD's Radeon HD 4650 GPU armed with an AGP interface supporting both 8x and 4x speeds. Great news for those with ageing systems in need of an upgrade, but there are a few provisos to be aware of. The Radeon HD 4650 AGP card features dual-link DVI and a single HDMI dongle is bundled in - users should note, however, that audio over HDMI isn't possible due to the limitations of the AGP bus.

Still, it isn't everyday an AGP user can tout 320 stream processors, 1GB of memory interfacing via a 128-bit bus, support for DirectX 10.1 and hardware-acceleration for high-def media. We've yet to hear a mention of pricing, but the card's complete specification is detailed by Sapphire as follows:

ASIC Radeon HD 4650
Bus Interface AGP 8X/4X
Memory DDR2 1024MB / 128bit
Clock Speed 600 Eclk /400MHz Mclk
Cooling System Single slot active cooler
Bracket Full Height
Display Support 2x DL-DVI-I/HDTV-out
VGA (via adapter)
HDMI (DVI-to-HDMI adapter), video signal only
HDCP Yes
External Power 1 x 6 pin power connector
Standard Accessories HDTV out cable adapter x1
S-Video to Composite adapter x 1
6 pin to 4 pin power adapter x 1
DVI to HDMI Adapter x 1
DVI to VGA Adapter x 1


HEXUS Forums :: 6 Comments

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'Interesting' position of the PCIe connector.
Nice little upgrade card. Plenty of “older” machines out there still that are fine for playing games on. Hell i've only just replaced a Skt A machine as the gfx card was strugglign with newer games. Cheaper to get one of these cards than to throw away perfectly good hardware. (mind you it was only 360quid to gut and replace with a fast dual core amd with 4gb ram and a 4770.)
I hope that PCI-E power connector is there for show and is not required.

It would kind of defeat the point in having an AGP card that required a PSU with a PCI-E adapter, computers that are likely to make use of this card will most likely have a PSU of the same period, so no PCI-E power connectors.
I suspect they will ship a PCIE power adapter with the card…
Surely you would need a Dual core system to take advantage of the new power? All very good having a shiny new gfx card but if the rest of the system is acting as a bottleneck then its a bit of a false economy. I think then that while lots of agp users (including myself) could buy it, very few would actually benefit.