XFX Brings Love to the AGP Bus!

With the advent of Windows 7, and its reduced hardware requirements, there is still a problem for many people who might otherwise be able to upgrade. There are lots of high power Pentium 4 and Athlon systems with more than enough horsepower to run Windows 7, but they lack a video card that will support the Aero interface. In many cases, it is not because the video card does not have the power, but because both nVidia and ATi have arbitrarily decided to stop producing drivers for older series cards. Many cards that comfortably run Vista’s Aero interface will not be able to be used in Windows 7 because of this driver lockout.

XFX is now releasing a Radeon HD4650 version for the AGP bus, with 1GB, and later 512MB buffers.

from Tech Connect

Jumping on the ‘Keep AGP alive’ train to be together with Gigabyte, HIS and Sapphire, XFX has released a Radeon HD 4650 card that makes use of the practically ancient AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port). Codenamed HD-465X-ZPFR, the new AGP 8x card has a black PCB and a single-slot cooler, a 4-pin MOLEX power connector, 320 Stream Processors, a 128-bit memory interface, and two DVI ouputs.

The 1GB XFX Radeon HD 4650 AGP has a core clock of 600 MHz, a memory frequency of 800 MHz and can be found in the US for $90. A 512MB version should also become available soon.

and

Lots of power, and plenty of snap for Aero, for either Vista or 7.

XFX is a great company, offering a double-lifetime warranty on their products, and in the off chance that you have a problem, the company is very quick with replacements, and sensible in the way they deal with their customers (voice of experience talking).

I have 3 Athlon XP machines (Bartons), with older video cards, but with large, fast 7200 RPM hard drives, and 2 GB of memory, so they will easily run Windows 7 with the addition of this card, and because of the 4-series designation, drivers will be around for a few years, so no problems being locked out of some of the action again for some time.

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