Home > Consumer Reviews > XFX GF 5200 128MB DDR TV PCI

I'll start this review with a some specs for my PC, which may explain why I bought a PCI card in this fine year 2006AD, and help those in a similar situation. I have a Celeron 2.6Ghz, 1Gb RAM. My PC has no AGP slot and an integrated Intel graphics controller, useless for any but the most ancient games. When it came to installing the item, had a total failure the first time. The Driver for my integrated graphics card proved very difficult to de-activate and the installation instructions in the manual that came with this card were not totally accurate in my case. The old controller kept overriding any instructions to use the new card. Eventually got it sorted and a few issues cropped up:
When installing the drivers I got a pop-up saying "The Device is not recognised as an XFX device. Log on to nVidia.com for the latest drivers...etc.", but yet once I had the drivers and software suite installed it worked fine. Went onto the site and there were no updates available. The manufacturer claims a maximun resolution of more than 2000 by more than 1000 (can't remember exactly) @ 85Hz, but max that's available to me in the options is 1280x960. I'm not sure if this is to do with my monitor, but I don't think so, it's pretty good, a hand-me-down from a graphic designer friend. Although my current setting of 1152x864 is enough really. The system requirements on the box state that the card requires a power supply of at least 300W, but mine is only 250W, and it seems to work fine (fingers crossed).
These niggling concerns aside, the improvements with this card over my old controller are immense. It plays Vampire: The Masquerade with only the slightest stutter when the CPU is under high load, but this is probably more to do with the CPU than the card. Very impressive for an old-ish card considering Vampire is only a few months old. Overall, if like me you are stuck with a dodgy PC with no AGP slot and an integrated controller, this card is the only way to go.

Very good... increases graphics - excellent for computer gamers and a very good brand. A must 4 any computer gamer, so buy it right now!!

I bought this card because my Athlon 2600+ wasn't able to run many games well under my then 128mb ATI Radeon 9250. I thought that it would have been a graphics card issue - after all I have a good processor (1.9GHz - not great but not terrible) and plenty of RAM (512mb upgraded now to 1GB). Yet for some reason I couldn't play older games like Freelancer or Half Life well (both are games with minimum spec's much lower than my hardware supports).

I blamed this on my cheap ATI card and the fact that it only processed DirectX8.1 onboard, leaving my processor to do much of the work for DirectX9/graphically intensive games - maybe if I got myself a newer card that processed DirectX9 onboard then my processor would be free to run games like a charm, while my new card would display these great games in glorious technicolour.

Not with this card it won't. I bought the PCI version so that I could keep my ATI card in my computer and run two monitors - something which I was able to set up quite easily. That's where the honeymoon period ended.

You see this card has the ability to process DirectX9, but it does so at the expense of everything else. The GPU is slow (240MHz) as is the RAM (333MHz), and there are no pixel shaders or anything - just anti-aliasing.

Unfortunately this card is so basic that, although it probably could process the DirectX9 stuff given a good GPU and RAM, it can't do this under a 240MHz processor and 333MHz RAM speeds. In fact, it can't do any of the other things that take advantage of DirectX9 either, leaving my processor once again to pick up the pieces.

A complete shot in the foot for GeForce on this one.

To run newer DX9 games like Half Life 2 and Civ 4 you will need something better than this, and to run even old games like Half Life and Freelancer you still need to minimise many of the graphics settings.

I would avoid this card if I were you. There is no advantage in upgrading to this card at all - if your computer is similar in spec to mine then you'd do well to get a better card or save up and buy a new computer. If your PC is newer/better than mine then it will handle a better card than this.

Note: although there is only a heat sink and no fan on the card, I found that I could only overclock the GPU from 250 to 300MHz and the RAM from 333 to 430MHz. It made no difference and I doubt all the cooling and overclocking in the world will ever make this card good!

The FX5200 is a budget 5200 series nVidia chipset, this was my first graphics card.. a year and a half ago. A bit out dated now, this would still be good for maybe your daughters first pc, or just a media pc, but really you are thinking of getting a PCI-E 6800+

So this card is out dated completley, and will not run next gen games on low if not at all.