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FORSA FX5200
Review Date: September 21, 2003
Reviewed by: Dwayne Sessom
Sponsored by: FORSA
Introduction:
The current line of FORSA cards includes the FX5200, FX5600, and FX5900 Ultra - all three of which we have reviewed here at PCExtreme. We are proud to be the first commercial hardware review site to have these cards for review, and we believe you will be hearing a lot more from this company! They will be available in North America and Europe at Powernode.com in September.
The GeForce FX5200 is aimed at the mainstream gamer who can't afford to shell out $500 for the top of the line FX 5900. So that is probably the majority of the gaming crowd. I know most of the gang I LAN with would fall into this category.
Packaging:
As with the other FORSA cards we received, the packaging was a bit light. The artwork is very good, but we felt that more attention should be focused on adding some additional protection for the card inside the box. The card is sealed in an anti-static bag, and placed into the rather thin cardboard box, with no additional padding.
Now with that out of the way, here is what you get in the commercial package:
- The card itself.
- The driver CD.
- S-Video Cable.
- User manual.
Features:
- Powered by nVidia GeForce FX 5200 GPU
- Graphic Core : 256-bit
- Core Speed : 250MHz
- Memory Configuration : 128MB DDR
- Memory Speed : 400 MHz
- Memory Bandwidth (GB/Sec) : 6.4
- Bus Interface : AGP 8X
- Pixels per clock (peak) : 4
- Veticles/sec. : 63 million
- Fill Rate : 1.0 billion
- RAMIDACs (MHz) : 350
- Max Resolution : 2048 x 1536 @ 75Hz
- Monitor Support : Analog Monitor , HDB-15 connector , VIVO , Digital Flat Pane l, DVI-I
- nVIDIA® Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
- Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Optimizations and Support
- OpenGL® 1.4 Optimizations and Support
The GeForce FX Family Tree:
GeForce FX series |
 |
|
|
|
| Name |
5900 Ultra
|
5800 Ultra
|
5600 Ultra
|
5200 Ultra
|
| Fill Rate (AA Sample/sec) |
3.6 Billion
|
4.0 Billion
|
1.4 Billion
|
1.3 Billion
|
| Verticles/sec |
338 Million
|
200 Million
|
88 Million
|
81 Million
|
| Memory Bandwidth |
27.2 GB/s
|
16.0 GB/s
|
11.2 GB/s
|
10.4 GB/s
|
| Memory Interface |
256Bit DDR-I |
128Bit DDR-II |
128Bit DDR-I
|
|
Notice the extremely large gap in performance between the 5200/5600 and 5800/5900. With the GeForce FX, there really is no midrange card. Even though the 5600 is marketed as the midrange card, in reality it is not much faster than the 5200, which is what we are focusing on today.
The card:
Unlike the Inno3D 5200 we reviewed a while back, the FORSA FX5200 comes with active cooling. This allows the card to run much cooler, and also makes for a much better overclock. Even though this is the low-end FX card, we were pleasantly surprised at how well it overclocked. For a card that retails somewhere in the neighborhood of $65USD, this thing handles itself quite well. We were able to play most games at 1024x768 resolution with very playable framerates!
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