SUMMARY: Today we are taking a look at the GeForce 6200 reference graphics card from nVidia which is designed to take on ATI's Radeon X300 in the low-end PCI Express VGA marketplace. After taking a detailed look at the GPU and graphics card, we compare in our usual array of benchmarks against an older GeForce PCX5900 and Radeon X300. You might be surprised by the budget gaming performance like we were.
The nVidia GeForce 6 series started out with the original 6800 series, designed to take on the enthusiast segment. nVidia announced shortly after the NV40 GPU made it to market that the GeForce 6 series would be available in value and mid range segments. The GeForce 6200 GPU uses the GPU labelled as the NV43. It is a new generation chip designed around the NV4x core.
In the table below you can see the differences between each of the different cards:
nVidia has chosen TSMC’s 0.11 micron process in order to produce the NV43 core. This process has been used by nVidia since the introduction of the GeForce FX 5900 series of cards and will continue for quite some time as its reliability is now one of the best for the production of GPU dies, as well as its heat dissipation capacity. When it comes to the die dimensions, it measures 120mm by 130mm making it the exact same size as the other NV4x cores available. nVidia hasn’t shrunk the size at all, this is surprising as the reduced pipelines and vertex engines would allow a more compact die size.
When it comes to the two versions of the 6200 series, there will only be two small changes. The 6200 will be the top performer and the 6200LE will come out sometime later on. This card will offer the same size memory, core and memory clocks; however, the memory bus will be reduced from 128-bit to 64-bit. This will seriously cripple the card for gaming, making sure that if you want high quality budget card, the 6200 core will need to be your bet. On the high performance gaming note, you will notice on the cards there are no SLI ports on the 6200 series. nVidia has elected to skip SLI support for the 6200 series, leaving this to the more expensive 6600GT and above to fill this void.
When it comes down to it, the 6200 is designed to take on ATI in its X300 series VPU role as the PCI Express budget card, which brings us to the bus interface. nVidia has no plans at this point to introduce the 6200 as an AGP component, however, it isn’t stopping the vendors like Gigabyte, ASUS, ABIT or the rest of the nVidia partners from adding the HSI bridge to a card and producing an AGP compatible 6200. nVidia’s plan for the AGP bus in the budget range is to leave it to the GeForce FX range of cards, since AGP is set to die off next year and with PCI Express now gaining popularity on both AMD and Intel systems, it won’t be long before we see the death of the old and faithful AGP bus.
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