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Well, graduation at St-Andrews was a fair bit better than I expected.
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I received and fitted the HiS AGP 4670 Graphics Card the day before I left. Installation was a snap and it works a charm.
I had seen HiS' AGP cards listed on websites before and I wondered how good their products would be versus the more recognisable makes like ASUS, Sapphire and XTX.

If you need to give your old AGP system a boost, this is the thing to get for the following reasons:

• consumes only 9W on idle and runs from an unbranded 250W power supply, even on full overdrive under full GPU and CPU load.
  Unlike some 4650s, which, apparently, have the Overdrive feature disabled, the HiS 4670 can make full use of Overdrive if desired.
• Allows for totally smooth performance in HL2 at 1280x1024 with absolutely all settings maxed-out, even the settings added in updates such as HDR.
• Has a big waterblock/heatsink thing on top plus a small fan so it remains very cool (30'C idle, 50'C load) and is very quiet
• Has 1GB DDR3 RAM and an HDMI-port unlike some 4650s. The GPU has its own soundcard in order to send and audio signal via the HDMI-port.
• The 4670 like most modern GPUs can decode 1080p video files internally, allowing any machine to play downloaded, compressed Full-HD video in the ubiquitous h.264 format using DXVA, which is supported by most codec packs.

To summarise, the HiS 4670 is a brilliant combination: quiet, efficient and with quite a lot of gaming-power; about as much as a 3850 and without the power requirement and noise.

Therefore, it seems like the perfect choice for converting a desktop into an efficient [ home media server / downloading mule / home-theatre-PC ] that you might also like to use for some not-so-casual gaming from time-to-time as well.
For about £95 delivered it wasn't cheap but it's a lot cheaper than buying a new media PC complete with a comparable GPU.

The only things to be noted about the product are that it requires 2 bays; the AGP bay plus the space for the one PCI card beneath it. This, however, is true of many GPUs and seriously, who doesn't have a spare PCI-slot, even on a Micro-ATX motherboard?
Because the 4670 uses an ATI chip, it doesn't have NVidia's CUDA technology for easy hardware acceleration of various things such as video.  Only a small number of codecs can even make use of it anyway
Another thing is that most modern games require far more power than that provided by most AGP-era CPUs.  CPUs can rarely be replaced by anything significantly better because the manufacturers change the sockets of their CPUs every year say.  This means that with recent titles, you're gonna find that your CPU holds back the GPU's performance a lot.  This is because of new games' more advanced physics and AI, which are handled by your CPU.  Therefore your new GPU won't turn your old machine into a Crysis-buster.  This is certainly sad but it is also no fault of the product.  It's simply an inconvenient fact of life.