Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup, Part 4: Budget Shootout
by Derek Wilson on December 15, 2003 11:14 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Budget Cards
The NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra has been around for a while, as has the ATI Radeon 9200. The newcomers in this review are the part of the SE line of Radeons from ATI: the 9600 SE and 9200 SE.
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
We used a reference model of the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra. We note that this is the only card in the budget group to require power via a molex connector from the power supply.
This is an ATI designed Radeon 9200 card. This card is stated as being “DirectX 9.0 Compatible” as is its little brother, the 9200 SE. This is a step down from other current generation ATI cards, which claim that they are “DirectX 9.0 Compliant”. We will find out exactly what this means for games in our performance analysis.
ATI Radeon 9600 SE
ATI Radeon 9200 SE
The two SE models that we used are designed by ASUS . The difference between these cards and their counterparts is simple: the memory bus is cut from 128bits wide down to 64bits wide. This has a different impact on different games, lowering performance at the most on memory bandwidth intensive applications. Other than that difference, these cards are set up the same as existing non-pro 9600 cards and 9200 cards.
The test system that we used is the same as used in Part 2 and Part 3 of our roundup series:
AMD Athlon64 FX51
1GB DDR400 (2x512) RAM
nForce3 Motherboard
Without further ado, we bring you gaming performance.
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KristopherKubicki - Monday, December 15, 2003 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1933...Radeon 9700 Pro outperforming the 9800 XT :)
Nice.
Kristopher
sauron - Monday, December 15, 2003 - link
I question the validity of a budget video card shootout when the test platform is and AMD FX51 processor running on a Nforce3 platform and utilizing 1 gig of ram( a setup noone who is shopping for a budget video card has). I mean, how many people out there who play games will put together an Athlon FX system with 1 gig of top of the line RAM and then stick a radeon 9200 in it? Nobody.If you're trying to help people on a budget decide which card to buy I believe you should test the cards on a "budget" or mid-range system to show how the cards perform on the type of systems which prospective purchasers of these cards are likely to own. I would at least show one or two comparative benchmarks on a system with a mid-range althon, similar to your CPU scaling tests in past reviews. In it's current form, this article is misleading at best, and is going to convince someone who has a 1 gig athlon to go out and buy a radeon 9200 and try to play C&C Generals or Halo on it which is not going to be a very fun experience at 5-12fps.
PS - I just want to say that I generally love the content of this site and consider it to be the top tech review site on the net. This article, however, really got under my skin because people who don't have alot of cash to spend are going to rely on it without noticing the fact that the cards were tested on an Athlon FX51.