GeForce 5200 vs 5500 vs 6200

ok, I'm confused.. sort of.. I'm buying a new video card for my PC, it's WinXP, 2.4GHz Pentium 4 with 512MB and a Asus P4PE (agp 4x) motherboard

I'm tight on money and looking at the following GeForce cards:

FX5200 128mb
FX5500 256mb
6200 256mb

The only thing I need it for is SL, so not super high end twitch gaming.
I really don't want to buy the more expensive 256meg cards as money is tight.. but I was wondering how much differeance it's make?

I mean I've had SL on a 32mb geforce one and it ran... so i'm thinking i can live ok with 128mb

thanks

all 3 of those cards are going to give you about the same level of performance

the best would be the 5500, but its not gonna be a huge difference

memory wise, i run 128mb of video ram and have no issues (most of the time)

but why these cards???

for 55 bucks at tiger direct you can get a 256mb 6800 that would monkey stomp any of the above

well there on ebay.. and with shipping (to Canada) , the cheapest is 42 and the two 256mb ones are just over 60..

just checked tigerdirect.com, they don't ship to Canada, so I checked tigerdirect.ca.. exact same card is $20 MORE even though the Canadian if current worth slightly more then the USA dollar.. (1 CAD = 1.00236 USD)

get the 6200 then becuase of power ... (speaking of witch you need a healty power supply for these)

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200. 250 MHz GPU. 4 Pixel Pipelines. 350 MHz RAMDAC.
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500. 270 MHz GPU. 4 Pixel Pipelines. 400 MHz RAMDAC.
NVIDIA GeForce FX 6200. 300 MHz GPU. 4 Pixel Pipelines. 450 MHz RAMDAC.

btw
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3001066&CatId=318
http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1776106&Sku=P450-8568

Do they still make the 5000 series?

The 6200LE I had on this machine before my recent upgrade to a 8600GT did me quite well. Not exceptionally high frame rates but more than adaquate for SL.

yes they still make the 5500 ( owned one awhile back ) etc series. It was a good series of Graphic cards. But problem is the drivers. And No you will not get the same level perforance from those three. The 5500 256 MB version gives you much better peformance then the rest. Not because of the memory size, it can handle Sl graphics for the value. The others are good Graphic cards but make sure you can live with what you buy.

Thanks, those are sure tempting and I do have a nice power supply in this PC, 451 watt EnerMax, so I think it should hand most anything I could (afford to) throw at it.

Mainly it'll be Sl and MS Flight Sim that I'd be running.

I wouldnt recommend any of those really, 6200 is lowest id pick of those.

But FX cards are really baaad, they make more heat then any of the nvidia cards i know of and power consumption also the worst of any nvidia card, they get beat by a 6600 card by more then twice the fps in tests wich uses less power and make less heat.

I higly recommend you look at 6600/6800 128/256, ram on vid card doesnt do much for fps unless youre running high resolutions really.

FX, LE , SE , anything thats not gt / gts / gtx , isnt very recommended on vid card those are lightweight and pretty useless for heavy rendering.

Tried to dig up vid card comparison chart for these cards but lowest i saw was 6600 ~ http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html

The 6200 I have has no fan which is nice and quiet. at 4x AGP you wont see much of a difference performance wise between those three cards..

adding another 512 ram would really help..

-whyroc

If you don't need a new video card right now, it might be best to wait until LL gets around to releasing another Windlight beta and then ask people who have one of the listed cards for feedback.

the 6200 i pointed out on my specs and on tigerdirect is not a crap edition card (LE IE SE MX POS whatever) its just a normal 6200

that being said, i can not see how a chip thats basicly a slightly faster 5500, with newer rendering features (which will be better for windlight), on a smaller die, dual memory channels (vs 1) and producing less heat is the lowest of the 3

ive personally had a fx5200 and it was totally worthless
one of my buddies has a 5500 and its ok, for a old card
and again im talking about a real 6200, and not a crap edition card

its not what i would buy, i would hold out on a deal for something like a 6600GT (like the one i got for 50 bucks after 40$ rebate on tiger)

mine is a overclocked card runs at 525mhz and has a 1ghz ramdac, it screams along quite nicely on "twitch" games (quake 4 full blast 1280x1024 ~ 120fps) and handles SL just fine, eventho its only got 128mb

anywho if you only have a 32mb card its probally old or really cheap so a video upgrade would give you a good bump, but going upto 1gb of ram probally would help out abit more

course both would be best

THanks for all the replies

From what I can tell so far.. THe FX5x00 cards are actually slower then my Geforce 4 4200ti I run now.. go figure..

but what this windlight? I've never heard of it before.. guess I'll go do a search..

Am running an AGPx8 6200 (nv43) with 256mb of memory here in Linux. I'm sure there are better out there, but it's perfectly good for SL.

Nice and quiet too as someone else mentioned, I've had cards die on me before because the fan failed, so am hoping this one might last a bit longer! The quiet running was also a factor when I bought it.

Windlight is a technology firm purchased by LL to add better lighting and skies to SL. At present, this looks stalled* as many major LL development activities tend to be. I wouldn't hold my breath (or my graphics card purchase) waiting for that. Windlight is also likely to swamp an AGP 4x if it does make it into the viewer.

* http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/06/14/windlight-update/

That one of my concerns.. At what point does one of the cards become limited dues to AGP 4x vs 8x... No sence going over board, since I know my next motherboard will not be APG when that day comes..

Make an extra hundred dollars...by a good video card...quit job.

the only 4x cards your gonna see are old / super cheap and would cost the same

The main problem from an economics perspective is, you move one bottleneck by upgrading one element, to another. There is only so much juice that can be drainned through the old AGP X8 port. I suspect you will spend 50 bucks+ on a GC, only to find that the gains are minimal due to FSB, CPU, Ram speed/capacity, HD IDE ports etc etc.

If you are generally happy with your HD, Monitor, Power Supply, you may find saving your pennies into more cash, then buying another MotherBoard, CPU, memory and GC, utilising the existing case etc, would provide greater dividends for at least a year.

BTW LL didn't 'buy' the company that produces Windlight, they have licensed its use on the SL platform. They may however have bought some shares. The introduction of Windlight to the platform has been delayed due to 'graphic API incompatabilities. Once they sort that out, to make it more cross platform useable (including GC and CPU), they intend to introduce it. It has little real fucntionality, except to make the atmospherics more pretty, but unless you have a fast system, you will probably turn it off.

I just installed a e-geforce 6200 and now none of the sl viewers will load the log in screen. When I click to open the sl viewer, it detects hardware then sends a crash report. After that I'm looking at the desk top. I never even get to the log in screen.
Does anyone have any ideas how I can get past this?

My old card would eventually load but it was just too slow and I couldn't get logged in.
The only good computer I had is fried so I'm trying to get an older computer going.
I have plenty of ram installed and other 3d games work just fine.

Having used all three cards in question, i found the 6200 (standard, not light version) to perform the best in all circumstances. I have one of the "silent" ones in an older computer (Athalon XP 2700+; 3 megs ram). I added an auxiliary fan as I have seriously OC'd the card. It will run just about anything at decent frame rates, including SL.

A freind has the 5200 installed on an old emachine (around 1.8 ghz amd and 1 meg ram), and it runs sl at a decent rate but chokes on windlight. I think her agp is only 2x


I am using NGO v2.9792 drivers for the 6200 and oc by Riva Tuner.