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I’ve recently sold off all my desktop machines in favour of the Small Form Factor (SFF) ones. I’m currently in possession of a Shuttle XPC SB65G2 with an Intel 865PE chipset running on 2Gb Kingmax PC3200 DDR memory (maxed out) and an Intel Prescott 3.4Ghz (fasted processor it will take). Despite the fact that it’s a rather ageing Pentium 4 (Core 2 Duo just came out two months ago) machine with an AGP 8x slot, it still performs relatively well. It had a Sapphire Radeon 9700 Pro in it, and by “had”, I mean I sold it off on eBay very recently in hope to gather some cash for its successor.

Why did I do such a thing? Well after going through various articles and forums on the Internet, I’ve found that there is still plenty of life in an AGP-equipped system, with the right video card and processor of course. I was on the search for the ideal video card which must have the following criteria:

1. An AGP 8x card
2. Will fit in an SFF (single slot solution)
3. Runs cool in an SFF
4. Best bang for buck
5. Somewhat future-proof (about 12 to 18 months)

After much Google-ing and reading user experiences with their video cards, I had my eye on three AGP cards (available at time of writing):

1. XFX GeForce 6800 XTreme 256MB DDR3 AGP
   - Link to manufacturer’s page
   - (unable to find a reliable review, let me know if you have one)
   
2. BFG GeForce 7800 GS OC (OverClocked) 256MB DDR3 AGP
   - Details: Manufacturer’s page
   - Review: Firing Squad
   
3. Leadtek WinFast A7600 GT TDH 256MB DDR3 AGP
   - Details: Manufacturer’s page
   - Review: Hardware Zone
   

The XFX card is the cheapest and oldest card, but is also extremely popular since it’s based on the very powerful GeForce 6800 XT chipset and can be obtained for less than £65.00. The drawbacks for this card are that it gets quite rather hot and noisy (not really ideal for SFF) and lacks Shader Model (SM) 3.0 support which is becoming widespread in modern games.

The BFG card has a GeForce 7800 GS chipset which is exclusively an AGP-only product from Nvidia. It has support for SM 3.0 and runs cooler than the 6800 XT, but in some benchmarks, still loses to the 6800 XT. However the 7800 GS is likely to surpass the 6800 XT in resolutions 1280×1024 and above. It may look like the 7800 GS is a better choice, but at £160.00 (double the cost of a 6800 XT), it doesn’t look like a good buy.

Enter the offering from Leadtek. It has a GeForce 7600 GT chipset which has support for SM 3.0 as well and has a higher clock speed than the 7800 GS. Although the 7800 GS is in theory, a better GPU, it’s a crippled version of the 7800 GT. The 7600 GT has not been crippled at all and is identical to the PCI-E counterpart; same number of pipelines, same clock speeds for both core and memory. On top of that, it runs cooler than the 7800 GS and get this, costs about £120.00 (about £40.00 cheaper).

It’s obvious that I have chosen the Leadtek to fit in my Shuttle SB65G2. However, now there are two issues to deal with:

1. Leadtek 7600 GT AGP cards getting hard to find
2. the release of Sapphire ATI Radeon X1950 Pro AGP

TO BE CONTINUED…