HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAHHAAHHAHAAHAA. The FX series is the Nvidia "dork age".

gotta love the fake benchmarks ;D

I have a 5200.... one of the biggest regrets in video card purchasing history.

I almost bought one, but settled for a Geforce FX 5500

The FX5200 Ultra is not that bad, I think it performs in the region of a GF3 Ti500 - Ti 4200 if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah, the 5200 Ultra wasn't that bad of a card... it's the other variants of the 5200 that really gained it the reputation of epic suckitude, especially the crippled 64-bit versions.

Though I do seem to remember the Ultra's price put it in kind of a difficult spot, up against the Ti4x00 cards which were still on the market at the time...

I bought a 5200FX, then returned it and paid extra to get an ATI 9800. Gotta tell you thats the kind of step up I was expecting from my Geforce 3. The ATI 9800 one of the great all time 3d boards in my opinion...

telanus wrote:

I almost bought one, but settled for a Geforce FX 5500

Same chip as the 5200 😀

Shagittarius wrote:

I bought a 5200FX, then returned it and paid extra to get an ATI 9800. Gotta tell you thats the kind of step up I was expecting from my Geforce 3. The ATI 9800 one of the great all time 3d boards in my opinion...

Yup there's a difference between those two that's for sure. 😁 😁

Don't think I have one, and I prefer the Radeon 9X00 over it anyway.
Apart from maybe the PCI version, is there anything special about the card?

The tech demos for the FX series were quite pretty though... in fact many games today do not look as good to me.

Tetrium wrote:

is there anything special about the card?

It's a legendary case of hype backlash with a lot of fanboy handwaving. "The way it's meant to be played" became the silliest defense ever.

I prefer the 9500 over it too... which stomps all over the FX lineup as a whole in both price and performance. ;D

They are still on sale in my country
http://www.maplin.co.uk/maplin-value-nvidia-g … ics-card-223892

They are still on sale in my country

Those things you linked are still available here too, but do not confuse those with the original 5200... the only thing they have in common is the NV31 core. Those downclocked 64-bit cards would have been more appropriately named FX5100 or FX5000.

But in fact it's a 5200SE. The main problem was that manufacturers "forget" the suffix which make a big difference. They're not worth even a cent.

I've got one of these. (Link to ebay advert featuring a Gainward FX5200.)

I'm not sure if this 128-bit Gainward FX5200 is an "ultra" model. There's a fan header, if you want to attach one. Or perhaps this is the "ultra" model, and the factory simply removed the fan, downclocked it slightly, and sold it as a "standard" model?

I really like it. It plays Quake 3 very well. OC's quite well too. The signal quality is very good, it's silent, doesn't eat up too much power (I think), and I think it's VESA 3.0 compliant. Great budget card. Really glad I've got one.

30 pounds? I'd buy one only for like €5 or so. They seem pretty limited compared to what I already have.
Worse is, I saw one for sale a couple years ago and it even had active cooling, yuk!

Well of course the entire FX series sucks. I don't think anyone's disputing that! 😁 I have a FX 5900 Ultra running 500/450 and it gets its ass handed to it by a Radeon 9600 in Half Life 2 DX9 mode. I even tried Oblivion on it and its only barely playable at 640x480 with Medium settings. A 9700 Pro runs Oblivion probably 3x faster.

I think it was how there were three cards with the Ultra suffix that got me curious. 5200U, 5600U and 5800U. I think the 5200 Ultra performs like a GeForce 3 Ti 200 in DirectX 7/8 stuff. The 5600U like a GF4Ti 4200. And the 5800U, which they obviously clocked as high as possible, performs similar to a 9700 Pro as long as you keep DX9 games far away.

There are actually two different 5600U cards. They changed chip manufacturing after a bit and the later cards run 50 MHz faster (400 vs 350).
http://techreport.com/articles.x/5660

The FX series are actually quite nice cards for games before DX9. They have better and faster anisotropic filtering than the older GF cards (assuming you use drivers that don't cheat too much). They also have some interesting anti-aliasing modes but the Radeons have far superior MSAA (due to gamma correction and up to 6X vs 4X). And of course they have NVIDIA OpenGL quality, and some games also used NVIDIA specific extensions back then or were specifically developed on/for NV hardware (see Bioware).

Man I used to have a Geforce FX 5600 XT which is actually slower than a vanilla 5600. I got that thing with my then new PC, a Celeron 2.4 and 256mb RAM. I know killer combo.
I remember quite fondly that a friend of mine had a Pentium 4 2.0 GHz and a GeForce Ti4200 and he enjoyed better performance. Half Life 2 autoselected DX 8.1 because it would work painstakingly slow in DX9. After a few years I got a Pentium 4 2.8 and a GeForce 7600gs and man was it an upgrade...

Funny story with those tech demos actually, a lot of them, if not all of them, refused to run with any other card other than an FX one. So Nvidia was bragging about Dawn and how it would only work on their cards because they had the best. That was until a bunch of hackers hacked it and managed to get it running on ATi hardware and it was actually running faster on them 😁

swaaye wrote:

Well of course the entire FX series sucks.

I was referring to the actively cooled FX5200 though, I never tried the midrange op highend version of this particular generation (The topic name was changed from FX5200-only to FX superthread since my previous post).

I think it's rather stupid to have a budget card with a small active cooler while a larger passive would be sufficient.
Imo not having an active cooler is probably the best thing about any lowend graphics card (apart from it's usually very low power requirements and low heat output).

F2bnp wrote:

Man I used to have a Geforce FX 5600 XT which is actually slower than a vanilla 5600. I got that thing with my then new PC, a Celeron 2.4 and 256mb RAM. I know killer combo.
I remember quite fondly that a friend of mine had a Pentium 4 2.0 GHz and a GeForce Ti4200 and he enjoyed better performance. Half Life 2 autoselected DX 8.1 because it would work painstakingly slow in DX9. After a few years I got a Pentium 4 2.8 and a GeForce 7600gs and man was it an upgrade...

Funny story with those tech demos actually, a lot of them, if not all of them, refused to run with any other card other than an FX one. So Nvidia was bragging about Dawn and how it would only work on their cards because they had the best. That was until a bunch of hackers hacked it and managed to get it running on ATi hardware and it was actually running faster on them 😁

Oh yes, I kinda remember this 😜

And anyone remember this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOVjZqC1AE4