A relatively new competitor in the video card market is Palit Microsystems. They sent over their GeForceFX 5200 Ultra 128MB which is a budget line video card. This is the lowest model on the GeForceFX line and is designed for those needing a low cost solution for their system but still want performance. This card is not for someone who is looking for a top of the line gaming video card that will crush other peoples 3DMark scores. The good thing about this video card is that even though it is a cost effective solution it will still do pretty much anything you are looking to do.
Below are the specifications for this video card which are pulled out of the PDF from the Palit website.
Controller
- nVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra AGP
- 256-bit GPU 2D/3D Graphics and Video Accelerator.
- 325MHz Core clock
- 1.3 billion Fill Rate (texel/sec.)
- 81 million Vertices/sec.
Bus Type:
- AGP 8x including Fast Writes and sideband addressing
Memory:
- 128MB DDR
- 128-bit Interface
- 10.4GB/sec Bandwidth
- 650MHz Memory Data Rate
Integrated RAMDAC:
- Dual 350MHz Support QXGA display with ergonomic
- refresh rates – up to 2048×1536@75Hz
Monitors Supported:
- Standard and Multi-frequency Analog Monitors.
- DDC2B Plug and Play.
Connectors:
- DB-15 analog monitor connector (VESA DDC2B).
- S-Video for TV-Out,
- DVI-I
TV-Out Supported:
- PAL/NTSC TV-Out system with flick filter
Video Playback:
- TV-Out 1024×768 resolution
- Integrated full hardware MPEG-2 decoder
- 64-phase Video Scaler – Scaling DVD and other video to full screen HDTV resolution
Display:
- nVIDIA nView multi-display technology
- nVIDIA Digital Vibrance Control (DVC) 3.0
High-Quality 3D Feature Set:
- nVIDIA CineFX engine
- CineFX shading architecture
- Support for DX 9 pixel shader 2.0+, vertex shader2.0+
- Z-correct bump-mapping
- Hardware-accelerated shadow effects with shadow buffers
- Two-sided stencil
- High-performance, high-precision 3D rendering engine
- 4-pixels per clock rendering engine
- 128-bit, studio-quality floating point through the entire pipeline
- S3TC texture compression
- Native support for 128-bit floating point, 64-bit floating point and 32-bit integer rendering mode
Antialiasing:
- Blistering-fast antialiasing performance
- Adaptive texture filtering
- Fast Z-clear
- Advanced display pipeline with full nView capability
Software:
- DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL 1.4 Optimization and support
- Support Windows XP, 2000, NT(all), 9x and Linux compatibility
- nVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture(UDA)
- Full compliant professional OpenGL 1.4 API with nVIDIA extensions, on all Linux and Windows operating systems
- WHQL-certified for Windows XP, Windows Me, Windows 2000
- Complete Linux Xfree86 drivers
The box of this video card is kind of plain; the top of the box has a formula one race car on it which goes along with the Daytona name. The back of the box has a few specifications in twelve languages which is more than enough I think. The box was really light which kind of surprised me because I figured there would be more inside.
The card comes in a regular anti-static bag to keep it from being damaged which is a good thing. The PCB of this video card is purple which I really like because purple is my favorite color. There is a good sized heatsink on the GPU so that it will be adequately cooled even though it is a lower model of card. Normally lower end cards have only a passive heatsink on them which does not dissipate heat as well as an active one. There is no cooling for the RAM on this video card because it will not get hot enough at stock speeds. From the side of the card you can see that there is a VGA, S-Video, and DVI port which is really cool because a lot of times budget card will only have a VGA port.
This video card is pretty lacking as far as extras are concerned. The only thing this video card comes with is a S-Video cable and a driver CD. This is pretty much expected because this is a budget video card and if they added all kinds of goodies the price would be too high. The only thing that I would have liked to see included would have been a DVI to VGA adaptor.
I like the fact that this video card is using BGA (Ball Grid Array) RAM chips because this is a budget model video card which would normally use the older style of RAM chips which are rectangular. With BGA RAM chips you are usually able to get a little bit more of an overclock out of your video card than with the older chips which is a nice bonus. This GeForceFX 5200 Ultra is using Samsung 3.6ns chips which should do pretty well when it comes to overclocking.
The heatsink is held on by two plastic clips which is pretty standard and are easy to remove. After taking the heatsink off I found a really good amount of thermal compound on the core so that there is good heat transfer happening. A lot of the time the thermal compound will be a pretty poor but this is not the case with this card. You can also see that the heatsink has a sufficient amount of compound as well.
I cleaned off the core of the GPU to take some pictures and as you can see the card is of course using the GeForceFX. I then reapplied thermal compound to the core, replaced the heatsink, and installed the card to my system. The card installed with no problem and did not interfere with anything on the motherboard.
I will be using 3DMark2001SE, 3DMark2003, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament 2003, Serious Sam 2, and Jedi Knight II to benchmark this video card. All of the testing was done with all the eye candy turned on and everything at it’s highest. I will be benchmarking with the resolutions of 1024×768, 1280×1024, and 1600×1200. With Unreal tournament 2003 I used 1280×960 because the benchmark tool did not have 1280×1024 as an option. I used nVidia’s 43.45 detonator drivers and ran all the tests from my system which was just formatted.
Test Bed
- Abit NF7-S Rev 2.0 (review to come)
- 1800+ Athlon XP
- 60GB Seagate Barracuda IV HDD
- 80GB Western Digital HDD
- 1024MB PC3200 Corsair TwinX (review to come)
- Palit Daytona GeForceFX 5200 Ultra 128MB
- Koolcase’s Panther
- Zalman 400w APF PSU
- Plextor 40x12x40 CDRW
- Plextor PX-504A DVD+RW (review to come)
3DMark2001SE is the predecessor to 3DMark03 however I feel it is still a good benchmarking program. The 5200 Ultra did not do as well as the older Ti4200 simply because it was not faster. Even with the new features to the FX line of GeForce cards this budget 5200 Ultra could not keep up. Overall the 3DMark scores put out are not that bad, however they are not good. Even at 1024×768 the 5200 Ultra was unable to break the 10,000 mark while the Ti4200 had no problem.
3DMark03 is one of the newest synthetic benchmarking programs from Futuremark and widely used for comparison of video cards. With 3DMark03 to get a good score you will need a really fast DirectX 9 video card. This 5200 Ultra does have DirectX 9 features however it is not super fast like a GeForce FX 5900 would be. In this benchmark the 5200 Ultra was able to outperform the Ti4200 at every resolution. The scores from the 5200 are relatively low but they are still better than the Ti4200. The problem once again with 3DMark03 is that you need a top of the line video card to get a high score.
Jedi Knight II is a pretty cool video game based on Star Wars obviously, this is a really good benchmark because it is quite graphic intensive. At 1024×768 and 1280×1024 the 5200 Ulta edged out the Ti4200 by about one FPS. At 1600×1200 the Ti4200 pulled ahead by one FPS which isn’t much of a difference. As you can see in a real world application these two cards are just about equal with the benchmarking and would perform about the same if actually playing the game.
Quake 3 is probably the most used game benchmark around the world and it will be used here as well. With this game the Ti4200 was a little better than the 5200 Ultra by around five FPS at each resolution. Even though the Ti4200 was able to output a higher FPS the 5200 Ultra still had a very admirable score and was above 100FPS in every test.
Serious Sam is one of the newer and more stressful games on the market right now. I used the standard benchmarking tool which was included with the game to do this testing so you would be able to more easily compare with the results. The benchmark does a flyby of the map and a bot match benchmark for each resolution.
I only made a graph for the flyby because I felt the bot match benchmark was irrelevant because it is done in 3rd person rather than 1st person like the game is played. This being the most intensive benchmark I did the FPS were the lowest that I saw but not disappointing. At 1024×768 this card was able to do 126.9FPS which is really good. At 1600×1200 the score was much lower at 62FPS but even that score is more than enough to play this game without any problem.
Unreal Tournament 2003 is a really good and graphically stressful game. I used the standard benchmarking tool which was included with the game to do this testing so you would be able to more easily compare with the results. The benchmark does a flyby of the map and a bot match benchmark for each resolution. The Ti4200 did a much better job than the 5200 Ultra which was unable to keep close to the results of the Ti4200. The results from the 5200 Ultra were a little disappointing but is understandable due to the nature of the card.
The bot match is done from a third person view rather than a first person like the game is actually played. Even though the benchmark does not run the game as it would be played it will still give you a good idea of what your system will be able to do when you are playing. Like the flyby benchmark the Ti4200 did a better job and produced higher FPS than the 5200 Ultra. With this benchmark the 5200 Ultra was just a little bit behind the Ti4200 and was still able to keep the FPS high enough so that if you were actually playing the game it would not get choppy.
No registry hack was needed to overclock this video card, after installing the newest drivers the option to do so was already there. This video card comes with an active heatsink which is nice because normally budget video cards only have a passive heatsink. I slowly overclocked the card little by little so that it would be able to burn in and adjust. After slowly increasing the speed of the card I reached the highest stable speed which was 370MHz core and 670MHz memory.
If I overclocked the video card any more my system would lock up when stress testing with 3DMark2001SE. I think that if there were some RAMsinks on the RAM I would have been able to overclock even further. I am pretty impressed with the overclock that this card is capable of especially considering that it is a lower end video card.
Conclusion
This being my first experience with a GeForceFX video card I am pretty impressed. I was not expecting to be blown away by a GeForceFX 5200 Ultra and I was not. This is a really good low end/budget video card which can still perform up there with a GeForce 4 Ti4200. I really like the purple PCB and the fact that the card has S-Video and a DVI connection which can be absent in a lot of budget cards. I would have liked to see a better software bundle and some more accessories provided with the card but that would have raised the price of the card. The overclockability of this video card is pretty impressive, I have to say I expected less out of it. I would not suggest this video card for those of you who want a gaming video card because you will be disappointed. If you are looking for a good, low priced, DirectX 9 video card I would recommend this for you. I am actually very impressed with this video card and am going to give it a 9/10 and award it the OCmodshop Seal of Approval. I would like to thank Palit Microsystems for sending me this card.
Pros
- VGA, S-Video, and DVI connections
- S-Video cable included
- Purple PCB
- Active heatsink and lots of thermal compound
- Overclocks very well
Cons
- No software bundle
- Not for hardcore gamers
- Lacking DVI to VGA adapter