Our First Retail FX 5200 Ultra Card

Recently we put up a comprehensive performance roundup of the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra reference board alongside some of the competing cards such as the RADEON 9000 Pro, RADEON 8500, RADEON 9500 and even cards from NVIDIA such as the GeForce4 Ti 4200 and the old GeForce4 MX460. Today we will be reviewing a retail GeForce FX 5200 Ultra 128MB graphics card, courtesy of Albatron. It does not matter that we are already aware of the performance levels with our reference card, there are times when the retail units differ from it and it is best that we still put the graphics card through our tests to ascertain each card’s implementation.


Albatron is one of the few graphics card vendors that strives to deliver enticing low cost graphics products and it would be great if they could deliver that with the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra part. We were displeased with the price range of most GeForce FX 5200 Ultra graphics cards as highlighted in our Performance Review, hence our concern. For now, let us put that concern aside and find out more about Albatron’s incarnation of the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra 128Mb with their FX5200U.

The Albatron FX5200U package ships with the following items:

Albatron FX5200U graphics card

Drivers CD

User Manual

InterVideo Software CD

Composite extension cable

S-Video to Composite converter.

Albatron casing logo sticker

Albatron FX5200U Technical Specifications

Graphics Engine	NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra GPU High Precision 3D Rendering Engine 4 pixels per clock rendering engine Full 128-bit Precision Graphics Pipeline Native support for 128-bit / 64-bit floating point and 32-bit integer rendering modes CineFX Engine Support for DX 9.0 Pixel Shader 2.0+ Support for DX 9.0 Vertex Shader 2.0+ Very long pixel programs up to 1024 instructions Very long vertex programs with up to 256 static instructions and up to 65536 instructions executed before termination Subroutines in shader programs Dynamic flow control Procedural shading Z-correct bump-mapping Hardware-accelerated shadow effects with shadow buffers Two-sided stencil Keyframe animation Programmable matrix palette skinning Custom lens effects: fish eye, wide angle,fresnel effects, water refraction DirectX and S3TC texture compression Integrated NTSC/PAL TV encoder support resolutions up to 1024x768 with built-in Macrovision copy protection Integrated  TMDS transmitters (support of 1600x1200) and external HDTV encoders Video Mixing Renderer (VMR) DVD and HDTV-ready MPEG-2 decoding up to 1920x1080i resolutions High-performance 2D rendering engine Digital Vibrance Control 3.0 (DVC) nView Multi-display Technology Default clock speed in 2D environment: 250/650 MHz (core/DDR memory) Default clock speed in 3D environment: 325/650 MHZ (core/DDR memory) 10.4GB/sec Memory Bandwidth AGP 8X including fast writes and sideband addressing Advanced thermal monitoring and thermal management Microsoft DirectX 9.0 optimizations and support OpenGL 1.4 optimizations and support
Graphics Memory	128MB DDR SDRAM of 325MHz clock rate (effective speed of 650MHz DDR)
RAMDAC	Dual 350MHz RAMDACs that support resolutions of 2048x1536@85Hz
Connectors	1x analog RGB connector 1x mini-DIN connector (for TV-output) 1x DVI-I connector (for Digital Flat Panel displays)
Drivers & Software	Driver support for Microsoft Windows 98/98SE/Me/NT 4.0/2000/XP, Mac OS 9/X and Linux NVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) Fully compliant professional OpenGL 1.4 API with NVIDIA extensions InterVideo WinDVD Cinema InterVideo WinDVD 4 InterVideo WinDVD Creator
Other Information	AGP 2.0/3.0 slot required 1 PCI-assigned IRQ Required 1 four-pin power connector