Video cards

[Sleepyz]

I bought an xfx nvidia 6200 256ddr2 card to replace my ati radeon s110 9250 256megs and not seeing much of a difference.

The card is supposed to be agp x8 but it seems to be at 4x. Either did this wrong or my mb only does 4x. No idea but computer is a bit over 2yrs old and from Compaq. And in the setup the memory says 256megs but don't see any DDR2.

Stubbs zombie demo. Didn't work at all on the ati. Said video not supported. On the 6200 works but get a black screen.

I think its a little more sluggist for painkiller than it was on ATI but doom 3 works a little better i think.

I took the lastest drivers from nvidia 81.98. Never touched the ones that came with the cd.

Now thinking of sending it back (Will cost me shipping!)

Any tips? I'm a noob for installing this stuff. If this helps.
p4 2.53ghz 1gig ram Power supply is only 250watts. Running on XP.

My Main goal for getting this card was for Oblivion which i don't think would of ran on ati but the 6200 was listed in the FAQ.
Didn't want to spend too much on the card since i'll be upgrading the whole thing in 6-12months.

 

[Capricorn]

Send it back

I'd send it back if I were you, anyway. My bottom line is you're probably not going to get what you want out of that card. The 6200 line is the very bottom end GPU NVidia offers with 1/2 the pixel pipelines and only 3/5 the clock speed in general of the next model up - the 6600. Their intent for that part wasn't gamers at all, but integrated graphics for motherboard makers. It would still be a great improvement over typical onboard video chipsets.

At a minimum, I'd look at a card in the Nvidia 6600GT or 6800 line. I know those are probably in the neighborhood of two to three times what you paid for the 6200. I have a 6600GT in my "gaming" desktop now. With it (on an Athlon 64 3200), I can run most games on their medium to high quality settings at a 1280 x 1024 resolution or 1024x768. 6600 GTs sell for about $140 plus shipping at newegg.com. That's with 128MB of DDR3 RAM. The lesser memory won't stack up poorly against the 6200 with 256MB. It's not the amount of memory you have that's the problem, but the speed at which you can get things in and out of it.

If $140 sounds too high for a machine you're considering replacing, I'd say that you've just found a reason to bump up that timeframe. If I was building new, it would be some version of the 7800 that I would use.