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Installation and benchmarks:
I made a conscious decision to use the older test
bed here in the 3DV dungeon. My reasoning is that
the level of consumer that is shopping for this card
probably has a similar set-up, not a beast like the
main rig down here. My thinking is that by running
this against a Ti4200 128Meg card, any performance
variance will show no matter what the FSB or how fast
the CPU is. Not to mention that this is a contest
between graphics card performance not necessarily
system performance. So with my reasoning explained,
I'll paint a picture of the test bed…
XFX
KT400-ALH Motherboard
AMD
Athlon XP1800+
256Megs Micron
PC2100
Maxtor 7200rpm
40GB ATA100 HDD
XFX
Graphics GeForce4 Ti4200 for comparison
WindowsXP Professional, service pack 2
The latest VIA Hyperion motherboard drivers
Dets 43.45
DirectX 9.0
As with most graphics cards, installation was very
straight forward: remove the old drivers, shut down,
swap cards, restart, and install new drivers. It's
nice to see that the drivers supplied on the CD are
the latest 43.45 Dets.
Once up and running, I installed coolbits and had
a look at the clock speeds.
Well, well, well, it looks like we're only clocking
250/400.. no wonder this thing will run with passive
cooling… Not to bag on the newest entry level card
so hard, it's just that I think progress means forward
motion, not back pedaling.
I'll start off with 3DMark 2001SE, and compare performance
to the Ti4400
As I mentioned in the intro, 3DMark
shows some serious lack of speed from the 5200, but
notice how aniostropic filtering has very little effect
on the FX5200. Antialiasing, however, shows some weakness.
When we throw both cards into 3DMark2003,
things are a little different and the FX5200 takes
almost a 200 point lead over the Ti4200
I would attribute this lead to the
fact that the FX5200 was able to complete all of the
tests. However, both cards were chugging along somewhere
between 1 and 8 FPS for most of the time.
Well, that does it for synthetic testing, lets see
performance when we throw real life games at them.
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