Tell me about this video card

I've had this vid card laying around and don't have any need for it. The problem is, I don't know Jack about PC's. What "kind" of card is this? I know it's a good card, I know this card sells on ebay for $50-$60 right now. But, is it a PCI, LMNOP, card? Is it as good as a plate of bacon?

Hotlinked because I'm a rebel!

Well besides the obvious facts ATI X1650 manufactured by Sapphire.

It's an AGP 8x card, the 1650's were pretty much the endgame of the AGP port before PCI-E took hold and dominated the market due to the faster bus rates.

http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/other/Pages/x1650-specifications.aspx

Basically it's 3 generations old now. It's a good upgrade if you have a P4 system or an old AMD single core Athlon system laying around. It'll play things like WoW at lower settings, SWTOR is going to be a stretch.

It would probably be useful if you were building an HTPC to run XBMC, though the Prescott series of P4's and Athlons are powerhogs compared to newer chipsets.

So, it sounds like it's not worth $50 then huh? Being that it's a few gens old and won't play WoW or what ever that other one is (not a gamer, can you tell?) very well.

Does this mean I should throw out those old ISA video cards I have lying around?

If you're going to sell it may as well take the 50 ish bucks instead of the hassle of recycling it, I'd make a joke about gas prices but that grease car...

If you've got an older system that the kids can play on that card will power most kids games and will be more than enough to get you online.

Or you could do this:

I'm also guilty of hoarding old cards... pretty sure there's a Sound Blaster 16 and a Diamond 800 video card sitting around somewhere.

Once video cards get that old, they aren't worth anything. No offense, but someone would have to be pretty dumb to give you even $50 for that card, the only reason being they have an old machine with a AGP slot, but there are other old-azz cards that were AGP and better than that.

It's like trying to sell a P3 computer nowadays. Brand new computers for $250 can barely run the bloated software of today, let alone a computer that is half as fast and has (at best) 512mb of ram.

Video cards are the components that go obsolete first. They're practically worthless if they're more than about 2 years old, and it used to be much worse than that in the AGP days when video card technology was ramping up rapidly.

That "3 generations old" video card has as much RAM as the computer I'm browsing this forum on (which is also my gaming PC), and even half as much as my music workstation.

I wouldn't toss it, just throw it on Ebay or CL. There's always someone whose old AGP card died and would rather give you twenty bucks than buy a whole new system.

For the longest time I kept my gaming rig "bleeding-edge as of two years previously", and only played games that old too. Then I switched to laptops and stopped upgrading at all.

Jay wrote: That "3 generations old" video card has as much RAM as the computer I'm browsing this forum on (which is also my gaming PC), and even half as much as my music workstation. I wouldn't toss it, just throw it on Ebay or CL. There's always someone whose old AGP card died and would rather give you twenty bucks than buy a whole new system. For the longest time I kept my gaming rig "bleeding-edge as of two years previously", and only played games that old too. Then I switched to laptops and stopped upgrading at all.

You want it? Just pay for shipping and I'll send it out to you. If not, I'll put it on eBay and see what happens.

Nah, not me... all my PCs are laptops for the moment. Thanks for the offer though.

The0retical wrote: Basically it's 3 generations old now.

It's actually 5 generations old now that the "southern islands" cards have launched.