Reference Board Examinations
I've been waiting until today to discuss the older 6200, based on NV43, since customs holdups stopped us looking at it on its release. With word of NV44 filtering through not long after, I postponed my official look at the NV43-based board until the NV44 variant came around. So from this point on in the article I'm basically looking at three boards: 6200, 6200TC 16MB and 6200TC 32MB, where TC denotes a TurboCache variant based on NV44.NVIDIA GeForce 6200 - NV43 version
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Click for a larger version
The NV43-based board carries 128MB of memory on one side of the board with eight TSOP-II DDR DRAMs having those duties. None of the DRAMs are cooled in any way, their relatively slow speed compared to the top speed grade of DDR sees to that. The GPU is cooled by a small heatsink and fan combination, the fan a ball-bearing unit that spins away quickly but without high or obtrusive pitch. It's not heat controlled, spinning at the same speed all the time.
The board weighs a svelte 178g, at the very low end of board weights that I've measured in recent times. The TurboCache NV44 versions of 6200 are different beasts entirely.
NVIDIA GeForce 6200 - NV44 32MB TurboCache version
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Click for a larger version
Passively cooled, the NV44 version with 32MB sports DRAMs front and rear. You can see the main difference between the the NV43 and NV44 TC versions by looking at the rear of each. The memory traces to the top row of DRAMs on the NV43-based board are completely missing. The front of the NV44-based board is busier, more power regulation components adorning the PCB. The GPU is cooled by a large black aluminium heatsink without a fan, meaning the board has no moving parts and is completely silent.
The board weighs in at 180g, a couple of grams heavier than the NV43-based version. The larger heatsink is the reason why.
NVIDIA GeForce 6200 - NV44 16MB TurboCache version
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Bereft of a DRAM device on the rear of the board, it's the only difference between both versions. It weighs the same 180g as its 32MB sibling, according to my digital scales.
All three boards come equipped with S-video, DVI and VGA outputs. Dual DVI isn't a consideration at this end of the market, the cost of DVI-to-VGA convertors more expensive than tooling the VGA output to the DAC.
It's a physically smaller PCB than the NV43 version which the following picture will show you.
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So what's it like in terms of performance, and how much are they going to cost? Let's have a look at those parts of the 6200 TC story.
