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eVGA GeForce 6200 N341 vs. N401

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First post, by feipoa

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Does anyone know if there are any performance differences between these:

eVGA GeForce 6200 AGP (256-A8-N341)
http://www.evga.com/products/pdf/N341.pdf

vs.

eVGA GeForce 6200 AGP (256-A8-N401)
http://www.evga.com/products/pdf/256-A8-N401.pdf

Both spec sheets indicate a 350 MHz Core clock, 532 MHz Memory Clock (2x266), and a memory bandwidth of 3.2 GB/s. Both are 256 MB cards.

Now if we look at the 128 MB card, 128-A8-N294, we see all the same specs, except the memory bandwidth has increased to 4.26 GB/s
http://www.evga.com/products/pdf/128-A8-N294.pdf

Adding further to my confusion is the 512 MB version , 512-A8-N403. With this card, the core clock is dropped to 300 MHz, the memory clock is the same, but the memory bandwidth has increased to 4.4 GB/s.
http://www.evga.com/products/pdf/512-A8-N403.pdf

Does anyone here have a clear understanding on what is going on with these cards and what the N-number means? Which card has the best performance?

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 1 of 20, by F2bnp

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Has to do with the memory type. First two cards have DDR memory, where as the other two have DDR2.
Also, the first and the third card have a memory speed of 2.5ns, where as the other two have a memory speed of 5 ns.

Reply 2 of 20, by sliderider

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If you're seriously considering buying an AGP GeForce 6200, look for one that looks similar to this:

chaintech%206200.jpg

The ones that look like that are the ones that can be unlocked to a 6600. They will identify as a 6700XL in the BIOS, though.

Reply 3 of 20, by swaaye

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Or just outright buy a 6600 of some sort.

It might be a good idea to look for fanless cards. The little 40-50mm fans are usually quite annoying (to me anyway).

Reply 4 of 20, by feipoa

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That was my plan: to find the best fanless GeForce 6-something. Are there fanless AGP 6600's?

EDIT: Any preferance for PNY vs. EVGA?

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 5 of 20, by [GPUT]Carsten

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There even is a fanless Geforce 6800 from Gigabyte (the 6800 GT looks similar, but has a fan hidden at the backside thought).

feipoa wrote:

Does anyone here have a clear understanding on what is going on with these cards and what the N-number means? Which card has the best performance?

What's most probably going on here is carelessness with copy and paste while putting together the data sheets. Some number are bound to be wrong in these PDFs.

266 MHz DDR-Memory with an effective data rate of 532 MT/s on a 64 bit wide bus gives you 4,256 MB/s of transfer speed. DDR and DDR2 are just protocols, the latter having a larger prefetch size allowing for the memory core to be clocked lower in order to save power. This makes DDR ever so slightly more effective at the same clock speeds because of finer grained accesses.

Reply 8 of 20, by feipoa

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Are you refering to the PCI 256-P1-N400 vs. the 512-P1-N402?

http://www.evga.com/products/pdf/256-P1-N400.pdf
http://www.evga.com/products/pdf/512-P1-N402.pdf

The datasheet for the PCI (not express) 256 MB N400 indicates a 1064 MHz memory clock, whereas the 512 MB N402 is only at 532 MHz. I wonder if this is correct? I called eVGA on this over a year ago and they confirmed it was something to do with memory technology.

The N400 thus has an 8.5 GB/s memory bandwidth, whereas the N402 has only 4.26 GB/s. Just going off the datasheets, I bought the N400 256 MB about a year ago in favour of the 512 MB version. I'm not sure how much performance this actually translates into the system on a PCI bus though. It would probably help if these cards were run on a 66 MHz PCI system, which is supported (according to eVGA).

I am curious why the AGP version of the 6200 doesn't have any cards with an 8.5 GB/s memory bandwidth? Are the PNY cards any better than the eVGA cards? I can't seem to find the same speed-based datasheets for the PNY cards.

I'm trying to find the best fanless AGP NVIDIA graphics card which is keyed for AGP 2X and 4X, not just 4X/8X. The eVGA 6200's are keyed for AGP 2X and the NVIDIA 6200 datasheet claims it is AGP 2X compatible. Some of those fanned eVGA NVIDIA cards above 6200 are keyed for AGP 4X/8X only.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 9 of 20, by swaaye

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8.5 GB/s vs. 4.26GB/s surely indicates that the former has a 128-bit memory bus and the latter a 64-bit bus. I think a 128-bit memory bus probably indicates a NV43 GPU (aka 6600). These were the early intro cards that they shipped before the slower/cheaper NV44 GPU was ready.

Last edited by swaaye on 2012-03-18, 04:42. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 10 of 20, by feipoa

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swaaye wrote:

8.5 GB/s vs. 4.26GB/s surely indicates that the former has a 128-bit memory bus and the latter a 64-bit bus.

Even though the spec. sheets for both indicate a 64-bit memory bus? Dual 64-bit bus compared to a uni 64-bit bus?

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 11 of 20, by swaaye

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feipoa wrote:

Even though the spec. sheets for both indicate a 64-bit memory bus? Dual 64-bit bus compared to a uni 64-bit bus?

It's either a 128-bit memory bus or they doubled the clock rate of the memory on the faster card. The only way they could equip it with RAM that fast would be to use GDDR3 and that was expensive at the time. So I think we have a 128-bit bus on the faster card and likely NV43/6600.

Maybe I'm wrong but I think that datasheet with the 8.5GB/s number is the early relabeled 6600-gone-6200 card.

Look on here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nv … 86xxx.29_series

Reply 12 of 20, by feipoa

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The eVGA PDF for that PCI card mentions the memory clock 1064 MHz, but says it is 64-bit. It maybe a careless copy/paste mistake as noted by Carsten.

Swaaye, thanks for the wiki link; it contains a lot of useful NVIDIA comparison information.

In trying to select the best fanless AGP (2x-8x) NVIDIA card, I see that the GeForce FX5200, FX5500, and 6200 are contendors.

With a quick glance thru of the NVIDIA comparison link we see that,

FX 5200
NV34
250 MHz Core
400 MHz Memory
6.4 GB/s memory bandwidth
128-bit memory bus
DDR
64/128 MB

FX 5500
NV34B
270 MHz Core
400 MHz Memory
6.4 GB/s memory bandwidth
128-bit memory bus
DDR
64/128/256 MB

6200 LE
NV44
350 MHz Core
532 MHz Memory
4.3 GB/s memory bandwidth
64-bit memory bus
DDR/DDR2
128/256/512 MB

I've been unable to find a fanless AGP GeForce 6200/6600 w/ NV43 @ 8.8 GB/s.

Any idea which of these 3 have the best performance? Have I left out any better fanless AGP NVIDIA card option? Many thanks.

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 13 of 20, by [GPUT]Carsten

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Out ot those three, overall clearly the 6200 LE, as the FX 5200 is really taking a nosedive on anything except for the most basic DX8 shaders - the 128 bit memory bus doesn't help if the engine sucks. Additionally, the NV44 really has 4 pipelines, the FX5200 has something... else, that mostly can churn out only two pixels at once.

But of course it depends what kind of application you might want to run on them. For DOS performance I admit I don't have a clue, for DX6-7 games, there might be situations where the FX doesn't suck so baldy, but generally, the 6200 is the better choice.

edit:
Almost all the faster NV-cards I have are only keyed for AGP4x, but there's on 7900 GT which is keyed for 2x/4x I think. Didn't try it yet though in a really retro system - only i815, which works.

Reply 14 of 20, by swaaye

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Yeah I agree. Other than out of curiosity, it's best to avoid the 5000 series because they were rather poorly designed hardware and the 6000 has no downsides that I know of. I think 6200 will be be faster than 5600U, because 6600GT is faster than 5900U.

The 5000 series is AGP 2x compatible. I'm not sure which 6000 cards are 4x/8x only but some 6200 and 6600 cards are indeed 2x compatible.

Reply 15 of 20, by dirkmirk

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The reason I asked about the pci 6200 is I plan to run it in a pentium pro system, obviously the ram bandwidth would'nt make a difference just curious is all, as far as im aware the 6200 is the latest/fastest pci card that has windows 98 support, even still its overkill for a 333mhz system.

Reply 17 of 20, by feipoa

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Thanks for the advice guys. I didnt know the FX 5000 was such a POS. Is the MX440 (NV17) any better?

Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.

Reply 18 of 20, by jaqie

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dirkmirk wrote:

a 333mhz system.

The fastest ppro is 200MHz. the 333MHz is actually an overdrive cpu which is a pentium 2 built into a socket 8 as a drop-in upgrade.

Reply 19 of 20, by swaaye

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feipoa wrote:

Thanks for the advice guys. I didnt know the FX 5000 was such a POS. Is the MX440 (NV17) any better?

Generally from a performance perspective, the lines go like this....

Geforce 2 MX 100,200,plain
Geforce 4 MX 420
Geforce 256 SDR,DDR
Geforce 2 MX 400
Geforce 2 GTS/Pro/Ti/Ultra
Geforce 4 MX 440-460
Geforce 3 Ti 200
Geforce 5 5200
Geforce 3 plain, Ti 500
Geforce 5 5600
Geforce 4 Ti 4200-4600
Geforce 6 6200
Geforce 5 5800-5950
Geforce 6 6600-6800