Thoughts and musings
Any card based on a GPU that's poorly powered is going to struggle with today's games. Our benchmarks highlighted the fact that the Gainward GeForce FX5200 PCI isn't going to provide smooth frame-rates with any form of antialiasing and anisotropic filtering enabled. That's why testing at our usual 1600x1200x32 4x AA and 8x AF was abandoned. A low core speed, relatively low memory bandwidth and very little in the way of data compression doesn't do it any favours at all. In fact, it's a GPU that's primed for the PCI bus - something which is intrinsically hard to say about a DX9-class of accelerator.
TV-Output was clear and crisp, perhaps one of the saving graces of an underpowered card. Users limited to motherboards without the ubiquitous AGP slot may consider the Gainward on the grounds of quietness, practicality and reasonable performance in older games. It would have been far more appealing had it been designed into a half-height design, as a number of non-AGP motherboards are tiny in nature. The Gainward FX 5200 PCI PowerPack Pro/660 isn't one for the power users, no PCI-based card can be. The card won't sell on performance, it'll sell on features. With NVIDIA's excellent multi-display technology, DVI output and crisp TV-Output display, the FX 5200 adds a number of useful features to the PCI 3D accelerator crowd. Bottom line - not a performance champion, but about as good as the FX 5200 PCI design is going to get.
The rating is based on how well it performs in its given sector.
