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GeForce FX 5200 Reviewed
EconolineCrush writes "Tech Report has a great in-depth review of NVIDIA's budget GeForce FX 5200, which brings full DirectX 9 support down to an amazing sub-$70 price point. Any budget graphics card capable of running NVIDIA's gorgeous Dawn is impressive on its own, but when put under the microscope, the GeForce FX 5200 looks more like an exercise in marketing spin than a real revolution for budget graphics cards."
This thing sounds like a hovercraft when you turn on the PC.
I wouldn't say the always crappy... The original mx was just as good as me original geforce-sdr at 1/4 the price. You really can't beat that.
The Monkey Pages: Not just another personal site...okay, so I lie.
As the poster states...looks like mostly marketing spin in terms of performance. "So, while the GeForce FX 5200 is technically capable of all sorts of DirectX 9-class eye candy, I have to question just how well the card will handle future DirectX 9 games and applications. After all, a slideshow filled with DirectX 9 eye candy is still a slide show." Throw some fancy "big boy" names on a box without the performance to back it up.
Colossians 2:8
-A.M.
Pimpin' all the Karma Hoes!
Does this honestly surprise anyone in the least?
THINK!
If the low end was worth the PCB is was printed on, there goes the market for the higher-end (and higher-margin) stuff.
TODO: Something witty here...
It isn't an MX.
The MX's had fewer features; this one is full-featured, just slower.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
you got me there, it isn't technically MX, but in my mind, its performance is equivalent with what I would consider the GF FX MX series ^^ that's fun to say. GF FX MX. try it
YOU SUCK BALLS!
You said it yourself.
It's a budget card.
No leaps and bounds in terms of graphics card techonology progress will be found, otherwise, it wouldn'b be a budget card.
Besides, they have to put a product out, so that they keep customer awareness on their products and not on ATI's, considering how the latest NVIDIA flagship product performs...
/. Where the truth
It's a good measure, but it invaribly means that you'll get lagging performance with these low-end cards, so it's something to be careful of. Maybe in a year or so, once shaders become the norm in games, perhaps Moore's law^3 will have enabled them to put those transistors back on and still hit their price target, but definitely not now.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
I trust when you say it has DirectX 9 support you mean it implements OpenGL 2.0?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I still use my old Matrox Millenium I bought in 1995 for $300 (if I remember correctly). Nowadays there are graphics adapters going for $70 that probably have more power and memory than the P200 that houses the Matrox Millenium. Moore's law never ceases to amaze me ...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Why use all the unnecessary GPU processing to draw a semi-realistic, semi-naked chick (as linked to Nvidia's Dawn demo) when you can play pics and movies of real naked chicks that looks tons better using the system intergrated GPU?
Tom's Hardware is currently recommending the geForce ti4200 for those looking for mid-range card w/ good performance.
This guy is way out there
Not really worth it. For just a little more you can buy a decent Geforce 4 4200/4400/4600 that runs better than this card. It only seems worth it if you want or need those DX9 features.
Btw, I am selling my GF 4 4200 card. I am happy with my GF2 MX. I stopped playing games, no really, I did.
Question everything.
Tom's recommendation changes frequently, depending on which compant gave gim the last shiney toy. Read THG for the articles, but don't take his Advice
I'm not Seth.
I mean, do you absolutely need the hardware support? Because I guess DX9 will sustitute for it in software. Of course I guess the frame rate will be lower, but it should still run i think. I have a 4200, but am on a dialup, so sucking down the 73meg demo is not exactly a joke.
Thanks for the update! I've been waiting ages for a video card that will play Nethack at 10,000fps! Who cares about 3-D games when you can go dungeon hacking?
proof that nvidia is trying to take over the world be afraid! More details Here
how much do you want for it and where do you live?
They are fine if you do 16bit color because the bandwith and not the chip is the bottleneck.
I am using a MX right now because the fan on my geforce4 failed. Miraculously it survived. I was replacing my motherboard due to a powersurge and noticed the card was scolding hot.
Quake3 and UT are fine in 16bit color. Doom3 would suck on it though.
http://saveie6.com/
Here's the deal. It's cheap. But will it play Doom III and Half Life 2 acceptably when they're released? If it can, then it's worth buying. If it can't, it's nothing more than a card for the IBMs, Compaqs, Dells, etc. who want to list "Graphics by NVidia" as one of their bulletpoints.
Looks like PNY have made a PCI version of this card. Before you l33t gam3r start laughing that it's PCI, a number of us have server-type or older motherboards that don't have AGP slots. The lowest price on Pricewatch I found for it was $139, so it's quite a bit more than the AGP version.
Any true nerd would have read this yesterday. Change your slogan to "New for Nerds. Stuff that Mattered Yesterday". I used to read slashdot for the most up to date news but lately slashdot has been behind at least a day in the cutting edge news.
Zoid.com
Check out the nude patch:
= by _message&message_id=202
http://www.digital-daily.com/news/?view_options
HA HA HA. I need a new card...
If anything will be the downfall of NVIDIA, it will be the fact that nobody but a hardware weenie can figure out what card is better based on the age/name without a secret decoder ring.
Seriously.. what average person would know that an a Geforce 3 TI200 was better than a Geforce 4 MX400. I mean.. geforce 4 sound better, right?
Likewise, who would think that an "old" Geforce 4 TI4200 is way better than a new Geforce FX 5200.
Please, NVIDIA, can you come up with some names that actually convey to people whether they're buying the 'Value' version of your graphics card, or the 'Professional/Platinum' version.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think there's something wrong with the ti4200 beating out the FX 5200 in every test?
Or is the FX the new MX line?
Who actually read this chicken scratch?
Anybody?
GF2MX, still runs a lot of games very well, I should know, my linux box has one on it..... safety net for you?
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Tom's Hardware has an article on the Gainward version of the card. It is water cooled.
The dogcow says "Moof!"
Is anyone else completely fed up with nvidia's moronic naming conventions?
First we had the original GeForce 1+2 series, and things were good. Then GeForce 3 Ti kicked it up a notch performance wise. Following this the GeForce 4 *Ti* series continued the improvement in performance, but the GeForce 4 *MX* series was also introduced and performed like a piece of overcooked dog-doo. In benchmarking my old GeForce 2 GTS card easily beats a GF2-MX 400 in 3D games and benchmarks.
But nvidia's marketing fools weren't done yet. Not content with ripping off kids who thought they would be getting a cool, up to date graphics card for a bargain price, they then introduced the following naming convention to the GeForce 4 Ti series:
GF4-Ti 4200 - Entry level
GF4-Ti 4400 - Mainstream
GF4-Ti 4600 - High performance
GF4-Ti 4800 - Either a 4200 or 4600 with an 8x AGP bus (read: no performance increase), depending on which version you happen to buy
So, we have a GeForce 2 that kicks the ass of a GeForce 4 in 3D games, and now a GeForce 4 4400 that kicks the ass of some GeForce 4 4800s but will always be slower than a GeForce 4 4600, which in turn will always be at least as fast as a 4800.
With the FX series, who the hell knows? All I know is that there is now absolutely no connection between the family number (Geforce 1,2,3,4,FX) and actual performance, and no connection between the model number (4200, 4400, 4600, 4800) and actual performance. Given that ATI is currently whupping nvidia in performance and output quality it seems to me that the marketing people at nvidia need to think *really* hard about their naming conventions. Amazingly adding a higher number to a piece of crap does not make it a faster piece of crap, although it may wreck your reputation with consumers.
Read Pynchon.
nt
...and called it a Porche MX 5800
Read Pynchon.
The reason why Dell is on top is they know what they are doing and put the best into their computers. I knew ATI's were the king of the hill when Dell started putting them into their boxes instead of Nvidia.
x ps.htm
Check out this gaming machine:
http://www.dell.com/us/en/gen/topics/segtopic_dim
Brian
well I have an extra $100 that I have been saving for the George Foreman USB iGrill...
God my friends will never let me down for falling for that one...
genius coder doesn't equal genius everything. oh and the rest of your statements are a load of crap, too, fyi.
While Tom's Hardware recommendation of boards that use the nVidia GeForce4 Ti4200-8x may be fine for current games, it's going to end up being a wasted expenditure when games that use the full DirectX 9.0 functionality start arriving later this year. Given that ATI's Radeon 9500, 9600, 9700 and 9800 support DX9 functionality in hardware, small wonder why ATI sales have gone up quite a lot recently.
Chances are pretty good that Doom III, EverQuest II, and a good number of other "hot" games coming out for the next few years will implement DX9 support; once that happens the fact that GeForce4 Ti4xxx chipsets won't support DX9 functionality means the new games are going to bog down with the older cards. Why do you think nVidia is preparing to release the NV35 chipset, which is essentially finally delivering on the promises of the GeForce FX 5800 chipset?
I knew I was planning on upgrading. Just didn't know when.
Anyways, several months pass by, and I'm happy with my built-in video card. that is, untill I see my cousin's card, a 128 Mb Radeon 9000 Pro. Which cost him less than $180. Going to computer shows, I've been looking high and low for some decent GeForce3 that I could use, but it was still too expensive, let alone a GeForce 4. At that point, I've been seriously been thinking about getting an Ati video card, for my Nvidia Motherboard.
How Ironic that would have been.
I'm not bashing Ati at any means. They've finally got their drivers working, and all is good. It's just that I want matching brands inside my box. Really
Anyways, looking at the performance of the FX, looks like it's on par with the radeon 9000 pro. And the price is just about the same too. Looks like Nvidia is looking to attack the low/midrange market, going head to head with that 9000 Pro. Which is where I am exactly.
I think it's time to get myself a video card.
No the MX line has no vertex shader, which is why the lowly Ti200 beats the fastest MX on some games, the MX has to revert to a crappier rendering pipeline with fewer features and more stuff done in software.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
*breathe of relief* What would I have done if my video card and motherboard didn't match?!
GF4 TI cards are a bit dated too. They can't do AA/FA at decent resolutions and be playable. You're best off getting an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro for around $300 or less where you can actually get some new graphic features that make a difference.
Hey c'mon this is normal. The budget NVidia cards have always supported advanced features, but when you actually use them they run like crap. I still have a Geforce 2 MX200 (a gift from a friend who got duped by a retailer). It supports 4x AA, but when this feature (and others eg: 32bit color on resolutions higher than 400x300) are activated, it craps out.
;-)
The thing overclocks nicely, and when running in "best performance" mode in 16bit, it flies, uh well kinda. The key with all NVidia budget cards is to run 'em without all the technical advanced features. The reviewer enabled all kinds of crap that the card only just supported. Perhaps NVidia would do well to not let their budget cards support these advanced features. Benchies would be higher, and I guess more realistic. Most gamers (or would-be gamers with crappy MX200's like me) try to squeeze as much juice from their cards as they can.
And the big secret is...
The FX 5200 was being compared to an old budget card. The 9000 pro has been replaced(for a while now) by the 9100 and 9200 cards which are faster! Not to mention that you can get a 128 meg version for 74$ just 5$ more than that card(at gameve.com).
The FX 5800 requires an extra PCI slot, and I use all my PCI slots (one for video capture, one for USB 2.0, one for the Audigy, one for video capture, one for the NIC, I don't even have a slot available for my SCSI stuff!!).
I absolutely refuse to give up dead necessary peripheral cards to add in a video card when they can just as easily make one that doesn't take up that extra PCI slot.
I'll wait.
(And no, moderators, jeez, this ain't a troll or flamebait, it's an honest opinion..)
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
You seem to be suggesting that your hand may be more lively in bed that his girlfriend.
Interesting. I do notice the unusually developed forearm you have there. Oh -- or, is that from excessive gaming?
Yes, but the GeForce4 MX is NOT to compete against or at least rivalize the Ti(s) in features or speed according to nvidia. The GeForce4 MX was to succeed the GeForce2 MX, not the Geforces 3 Ti. The number (4) is just a marketing coincidence. :-)
I was going tu burn myu mod points on this article but that is truely a scarey thing. As an "early adopter" that owns the original George forman I have to speak up here.
back in my day we didn't have no fancy USB connections for our George Foreman. All we had was a orang light and a 120v power adapter. The light would go on and off randomly but we didn't know why. However, we were confidant that it served as an important indicator to someone somewhere. We didnt have no sissy computer controlled timers and heat regulators. Hell, we didn't even have a timer or lever to adjust the thermometer. And you know what we liked it.
As a final aside I did indeed have to walk 15 minles in the snow uphill both ways between the fridge and the George forman to cook anything.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
The submitter said: the GeForce FX 5200 looks more like an exercise in marketing spin than a real revolution for budget graphics cards.
Tech-report said: The GeForce FX 5200 isn't as capable a performer as its feature list might suggest, but that doesn't mean cards based on the chip aren't worth picking up... The GeForce FX 5200 is a great feature-rich card for anyone that's not looking for the best budget gaming option.
Sheesh, why not let the article speak for itself and spare us the lame and inaccurate editorialising. It's not "an exercise in marketing spin", nVidia have just got a bit behind the curve and ended up producing a card slower than the Radeon 9000 and only very slightly cheaper. The choice between them depends on the features and price point you want, with the Radeon 9000 probably the best choice for most people.
No need for the conspiracy theories. nVidia's decision to go for directx 9 across their whole range might be arguable, but it's silly to claim they did so just to mislead people somehow.
Welcome to the real world. nVidia simply cannot compete with similar offerings by ATI at this point in time. Although the GeForce FX 5200 may be DX9 aimed at the masses, the performance isn't. Personally, I'd be more inclined to get an ATI based card, namely a 9000/9100/9200 series based card, even though they are "only" DX8.1.
In terms of DX9, the only smart thing would be to get a 9500/9600 Pro if you're looking for something in the middle end, and a 9700/9800 Pro if you're looking high-end.
I'm on a 9700 Pro right now myself, and there's no way that I'd consider any nVidia product at this moment in time. Maybe sometime in the future (and no, I am not an nVidiot or a fanATIc).
MX has all the features. It just comes with crippled sdram instead of ddram and the main chip is clocked slower.
Nope. The GF4 MX is based around the GF2 MX core with some added features (notably antialiasing and faster memory). It's therefore a DirectX 7 part, without pixel and vertex shaders. And all GF4 MXes except the MX 420 have DDR memory. See tech report.
Perhaps you were thinking about the difference between a GeForce 2 MX (most of which did have SDRAM) and a GeForce 2 GTS. But you'd still be wrong because they're also different chips with different features.
E-mail me an offer. I live in St. Petersburg, FL.
Question everything.
Indeed. And since I play a lot of old school games like the original Unreal Tournament, the GeForce4 MX with DDR is just fine for my LAN party box. It runs about $50 at Newegg from various manufacturers, and the 5200 is coming in at $75-$100 depending on which version you get.
Of course, my flagship box has the Ti4200...mmmm, antialiasing 'til the cows come home...sweet....
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
The GF 2 MX was a really nice card, it was my first "performance" video card, I think I paid $100 for it, although after that ATI seemed to have much better offerings for the sub $100 video card market.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
The other alternative is to get different colors of interior case lighting so you can't tell that the flashing purple light is over the greenish board and the flashing near-indigo lights are over the teal-colored boards...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
>Please, NVIDIA, can you come up with some names that actually convey to people whether they're buying
I could forgive this is if the gaming industry would include suggested resolution, bit-depth, etc for each game. Say I have a GF3 TI200 and want to play some new game. I don't want to screw around with the settings to get the game to a FPS/Color combo that is usable, the game should tell me this by looking at my GPU and CPU combo.
Now release this information publically and people shopping around for cards will be stunned at how their MX is worse than the card dell put in their computer for them. "What? I can only play Jedi Knight at 256 colors with this damn thing?"
I would think this kind of information is easier to swallow than highly-technical benchmarks or even the best product naming convention. At least for casual gamers and non-technophiles.
They were just ansy to talk about their Radeon 9600 again. They start out the article telling about how the 9600 is a much more expensive and more capable card, and that it is not really in the same bracket that the FX5200 is in, yet the entire thing seems to brag about how much better the 9600 is doing. If they wanted to put the 9600 into the review, they should have at least included an NVidia card that was comparable to it, if only to not make NVidia look bad. If a potential buyer were looking over this review, and didn't read the disclaimer at the beginning, he would be very turned off to this card's performance, which really isn't that bad for the price.
Companies REALLY should think about what they are reviewing before they throw something together to review it.
That's my flame for the day.
-3 Offtopic
+1 Insightful
I hate sigs...
For a high end GPU that is passively cooled you can look to the passively cooled Radeon 9700 Pro by Sapphire.
Sapphire Radeon 9700 Pro Ultimate Review
Basically you get a leading edge card that generated NO NOISE. A dream come true!
Great boobies honeybunch!
If I said you had a great body would you hold it against me!
My nipples explode with delight!
joe,killed by a wraith called joe, while helpless
I went down the Best Buy the other day and picked one of these up to replace my venerable first-generation GeForce 3. It does seem just slightly faster (to be honest, my little Athalon 1600 is likely the main bottleneck), but it also has problems with texture mappings in some games that the GF3 handles fine (Shadowbane and Battlefield 1942).
I took it back, not enough improvement to warrent suffering through another round of software updates until all the kinks are worked out.
Do a search for RivaTuner or SoftQuadro.
Yes, if you have a Ti-series card (Actually some Quadros were MX-based), you can "warez" a Quadro out of it with a driver hack.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
NVidia is still the only option for those who are in any way concerned with driver reliability. While ATI has supposedly shaped up, Catalyst drivers are still far worse than NVidia's Detonator series in terms of quality and reliability. Take as an example the recent release of HDTV tuner cards that use software decoding: NVidia cards are currently the reccomended one with the DVICO FusionHDTV, because the ATI drivers are so buggy. If you do have ATI, you are forced to use an *older* driver because ATI is too incompetent not to add 2D bugs to their drivers in the race for 3D. (Catalyst 3.0 works "acceptably", 3.1 and 3.2 are crashfests with the Fusion.)
Interestingly enough - In most cases, the GF4MX sucks. But for some oddball reason, the MX series has MPEG acceleration features (IDCT, MoComp) missing from the Tis. (Which have only one of the former two, I believe just MoComp.)
ATI hardware may be fast, but thanks to the drivers it's like putting a V10 into a Yugo.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Errr, actually
Mr Carmack himself is a large OpenGL fan. Additionally he openly questions those who rely on MSFT's DirectX too much. This is probably the reason why most (if not all) of his games have native linux ports.
Sunny Dubey
...when put under the microscope, slashdot looks more like an exercise in marketing than a real revolution in News for Nerds.
The silicon of the Quadros is EXACTLY the same as the GeForces, although in many cases the Quadros also were higher-clocked samples. But the wireframe AA is the main thing that SoftQuadro gives you - GeForce hardware supports wireframe AA since it's the same silicon, but because the PCI ID identifies it as a GeForce, the driver disables Quadro features.
It's the same deal as with the ATI 9500-to-9700 hack, except that the success rate is 100%. (ATI 9500s and 9700s are the same chip, just lower clockrates and with half the pixel pipelines disabled, often because they were defective.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I bought an ATI TV Wonder VE card and had all kinds of hell with my crappy on board video card, so I bought an medium end ATI AGP card which I could *never* get to work with my system. After two days of booting in VGA and green screens installing and uninstalling drivers, I returned in and bought a GeForce card that worked great first time and works great with the ATI TV Card.
ATI may have the hardware, but, I agree, their drivers are *BUGGY*.
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
Wow, thanks a lot for the link! Now I am really interested, this is true dream come true.
MSDOS: 20+ years without remote hole in the default install
I want a WI-FI Mouse for my laptop i dont want to waste my precious USB port (UGH!! I HATE USB!)
There is no god
just doing a little survey on which of these older boards would u choose??? price would be the same....i'm new here just hope u'll put in your choice and why??? thanx guys