is this a good deal on a video card

[qblunt]

Is this a good deal on a geforce card?? I have a crappy geforce 2mx 32 mg and its getting slow on some games that I tried. I have a pIII 1.0 ghz pc with about 768 mgs of ram. Would you guys buy this or get something else? Im not a huge gamer but I play some. I play xbox mostly. My bro has a radeon 9000 pro and he likes it and told me to get one of those, he also paid $99 for that. Thanks. It is a geforce 5200 ultra and not the regular one. Which supposely was suppose to seel for $149 for ultra and $99 for the regular.

http://store.yahoo.com/livewarehouse/vgld24950.html

[Bires]

I would have to say yes, good performance for under a bill.

livewarehouse.com has a decent (average) resellerating.

[ceeka]

Good performance? Where did you see that? All the reviews I see say the performance sucks.

I wouldn't touch a geforce mx or 5200 card if you like gaming. There have been sales of the gf4 ti4200 for as low as $80. A much haster card but without the eye candy a dx9 card can show. Not that the 5200 can play a dx9 game a a decent rate.

[Bires]

Originally posted by ceeka
Good performance? Where did you see that? All the reviews I see say the performance sucks.

I didn't say it was going to blow everything else away. I just said for a bill, it's a good deal.

Keep in mind that although it performs like a 4200 in most situations, THIS CARD has 128 MB of memory and 8X AGP. Can you find a 128MB 4200 with 8X AGP support for under $100?


from Anandtech
When looking at the actual products themselves, you can make a couple of generalizations about their performance. For starters, the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra performs much like a GeForce4 Ti 4200 in situations where no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering is used. Enabling either or both of those features allow the 5600 Ultra to significantly outperform the GeForce4 Ti 4200, mostly thanks to the NV31's superior memory controller, compression and AA engines.

The GeForce FX 5200 Ultra performs slightly above the level of a GeForce4 MX 460 in situations where no AA or aniso is enabled; but once again, enabling those features causes the 5200 Ultra to perform more like a GeForce4 Ti 4200 than a GeForce4 MX. The reason behind this is obviously not because of any compression algorithms (as there is no color/Z compression in the NV34 GPU), but rather because of the AA and anisotropic filtering engines, as well as a vastly improved memory controller when compared to the GeForce4 MX (not to mention the higher clock speeds).

Linky (http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1797&p=15)

[Cantacuzene]

Bires, for starters AGP 8x is worthless. The anantech artical you cited is talkign about the 5200 ULTRA, not the normal 5200 which is whats priced there. The card blows. A ti4200 owns the 5200ultra hands down.

The directx9 ability is worthless in that card because by the time dx9 games come out that card wont be playing them at an acceptable framerate.

[Bires]

Cantacuzene is right. The card shown appears to not be the *Ultra* version. For sub-$100, the Ti4200 is still better than the FX5200.