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FORSA FX5200, Page 2.
Review Date: September 21, 2003
Reviewed by: Dwayne Sessom
Sponsored by: FORSA
The card, cont:
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Unlike many other FX5200 cards on the market today, FORSA has employed active cooling for the GPU as I mentioned which certainly makes a difference in overall stability and especially if you plan on overclocking to get a bit more performance. The FORSA FX5200 has 128MB of 2.8ms Hynix DDR memory onboardwhich will aid in handling large textures while playing your favorite video games. The memory has no cooling what so ever, so don't expect a hige memory overclock unless you add some aftermarket ramsinks. Recently I have been seeing some FX5200 based cards with 256MB of memory, which in my opinion is probably overkill for such a low end card.
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The DDR memory rides on the front of the card only, unlike the top end FX5900, so the back of the card is pretty much bare PCB. One impressive feature of this card is that it has VGA, DVI, and S-Video outputs so you can use it for just about anything from gaming to HTPC applications. I'm not sure if there was supposed to be a DVI-to-VGA converter, and other video accessories, but they were not included in out review sample.
Test System Configuration:
To present accurate results and represent a real world situation as usual, I decided to run all tests on my main rig which I use on a daily basis. I think this is pretty representative of a top of the line system that would be out there in the real world. All WindowsXP patches are up to date, and I even left NortonAV running as I normally do when gaming. Here is my present config:
- Pentium4 3.0C @ 3.3GHz (220FSB)
- DFI LanParty Pro875 motherboard.
- 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMS PC3700 memory.
- Maxtor DiamondMax 40GB 7200RPM primary HDD.
- Maxtor SATA 160GB 7200RPM 8MB cache secondary HDD.
- Cisco Aeronet 340 wireless LAN card.
- Onboard Gigabit NIC and sound (all enabled).
- WindowsXP Professional w/SP1.
- nVidia DetonatorXP Drivers, ver. 45.23.
- DirectX 9B.
All benchmarks are run at the default settings. No manual adjustments were made.
Benchmark / Image quality software used:
- [H]ard|OCP UT2003 Benchmark.
- Code Creatures.
- 3DMark03.
- 3DMark2001.
- GLExcess.
- Call of Duty Demo.
- AquaMark3.
Since it is becoming increasingly difficult to review video cards due to the shift from "FPS is everything" to IQ (Image Quality) being the biggest concern, what I have done in this review is to try to give you the reader the best of both worlds - raw benchmarks (both real game and synthetic) as well as some in-game screenshots in attempt to convey the image quality that you can expect from this card.
Benchmarks:
On all of the following benchmarks, the image settings are set to "Quality" with Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering set to "Application".
The average frame rates resulting from the [H]ardOCP UT2003 benchmark are very playable. Overclocking to 300gpu/475mem results in a few extra frames on most tests. There were a few places in the test that seemed a little choppy, but overall it was pretty smooth.
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