Review: Gainward FX5200 Ultra Pro/760 XP

Before testing, I was expecting the little FX to be poor, very poor. What surprised me was the decent performance, despite its obvious budget underpinnings. I guess budget cards don't have to be too slow these days.

The lack of any optimised silicon to help maximise bandwidth on the GPU is a performance hit, that much is evident. And when we turn on IQ, things have a tendency to get nasty. But base budget performance is pretty good these days it seems, for the money.

While it would be nice to turn on IQ and not loose so much, it did well enough that experimenting with AA and AF in your games wont leave you wishing you'd bought something else. Just don't expect to push it.

For those wondering what a GeForce4 would be like, compared to the budget FX, it'd be quicker. However, i'd hazard an educated guess that NV25 on the GeForce4 is worse than NV34 when doing things like AA and AF, but overall performance will be higher than the little FX.

It's not a performance card, but you already knew that right? It's just not that slow either, which is a good thing for all.

Running with EXPERTool was an interesting experiment. Gainward made a big deal over it and were insistent that I ran the tests with it enabled. They are keen to emphasise that "no-one else supports the overclocked settings so it is imperative we are comapared in this way". That's fair enough, but I hit a couple of snags. First off, something I didn't mention in the previous pages. With the card overclocked under EXPERTool, giving a set of clocks they say are fully supported by the card, artifacting was present in a couple of tests. Nothing heavy, but a few flashes of corrupted geometry in 3DMark 2001SE and the odd popping texture in Serious Sam 2's IQ based tests.

Too much clock for the card it seems. Secondly, it's too easy for the end user to miss the fact that EXPERTool even exists. I'd much rather Gainward clocked the card at 350/700 from the factory using the card BIOS, giving them the extra performance out of the box. This was highlighted by the fact that I missed its existance during initial testing and I'm generally keen to see what board makers bundle with their hardware, since retail boxes are a treat for a reviewer. So be sure to take advantage of EXPERTool should you buy this board, the performance boost is small, but very measurable.

Gainward are quite correct in their statement that it's the fastest FX5200 Ultra you can buy, but that's only with EXPERTool massaging the clocks. Let us not forget that other FX5200 Ultra's are overclockable too however. In the absense of other FX5200 Ultra's at HEXUS towers, we can't see just how far other boards will go.

Video Capture

While I didn't have that much time to concentrate on the VIVO side of things, I did install WinProducer and grab some data from the S-Video input for a mess around. While capturing video, it seems that the CPU didn't really take much of a hit, a good sign that the GPU and associated capture hardware were doing most of the hard work. It's not a method for getting DV data off of a video camera, raw, but it is a cheap means to get decent looking video on to your PC for making your own movies.

The WinProducer software is easy enough to use, even for an uncreative misfit like myself, so any computer user will find it easy to get to grips with, thumbs up to Gainward for bundling the Intervideo software.

Noise

It was surprisingly quiet, given that we've seen variations on the basic HSF setup used on the FX 5200 before, on previous NVIDIA products over the last couple of years. Not as quiet as the big FX 5900's I've looked at recently, but no wailing banshee either.

Overclocking

With Gainward pointing out EXPERTool to me after initial testing, I decided to spend some extra time seeing if performance over 350/700 was available. With 350/700 giving some artifacting in a couple of tests, I wasn't expecting much more than that. My suspicions were confirmed, 356/710 was about as high as she was going, without corrupting in all tests. Not to bad, but not too great, and of course your mileage with any sample will vary.

Overall Conclusion

It's a budget board, and that means a focus on price first and foremost. At ~£145 retail, it falls down a touch. That's not much more than a few pounds saved over a mid range offering from NVIDIA or ATI. The price is offset by the video capture capabilities, and it's one of the cheapest ways to get video on to your PC with decent performance to boot. Thinking about it, the market for a cheap board for a family PC to get video on to the PC, for making cute home movies to mail to grandma on a CDR has got to be significant. But those customers are purchasers of OEM boxes, not HEXUS readers.

So does that mean an overall disappointment? Yes, in the tested configuration. It's too expensive and I can't see the VIVO features mattering to many of you. But, find a non-VIVO version for less money and it might pique your interest. It probably wont, unless you are seriously on a budget, but at least the option is there.

Unless the budget VIVO market is what you are looking at, get an FX5600 Ultra or a 9600 Pro. Both are more deserving of your money and worth the little extra.

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