PalitDaytona GeForce FX 5200 Ultra 128MB

I have been given the opportunity to take a look at one of the newest arrivals from PalitDaytona's line of video cards, the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra 128MB. This is one of Palit's entry-level cards in its line of GeForce FX products, which also includes the FX 5200 128MB, FX 5600 256MB, and the FX 5900 128MB and 256MB versions. As you can see, Palit has quite the arsenal of high performance video enjoyment. Palit Microsystems has been in the business for more than 12 years now, so they are definitely not a newcomer when it comes to graphics.

With options becoming more and more abundant, the consumer can easily be left in the dust when it comes to the latest and greatest in video cards. I hope that this review will help shed a little light on any questions you may have while deciding what will rest in your PC's AGP slot.

Here is a taste of all the latest and greatest features of the FX 5200 Ultra straight from Palit's spec sheet.

Features:

• Controller:
  nVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra AGP 256-bit GPU 2D/3D Graphics and Video Accelerator.
  325MHz Core clock
  1.3 billion Fill Rate (texel/sec.)
  81 million Vertices/sec.
  
  
• Bus Type:
  AGP 8x including Fast Writes and sideband addressing
  
  
• Memory:
  128MB DDR
  128-bit Interface
  10.4GB/sec Bandwidth
  650MHz Memory Data Rate
  
  
• Integrated RAMDAC:
  Dual 350MHz Support QXGA display with ergonomic refresh rates – up to 2048x1536@75Hz
  
  
• Monitors Supported:
  Standard and Multi-frequency Analog Monitors.
  DDC2B Plug and Play.
  
  
• Connectors:
  DB-15 analog monitor connector (VESA DDC2B).
  S-Video for TV-Out, DVI -I
  
  
• TV-Out Supported:
  PAL/NTSC TV-Out system with flick filter
  
  
• Video Playback: TV-Out 1024x768 resolution
  Integrated full hardware MPEG-2 decoder
  64-phase Video Scaler - Scaling DVD and other video to full screen HDTV resolution
  
  
• Display:
  nVIDIA nView multi-display technology
  nVIDIA Digital Vibrance Control (DVC) 3.0
  
  
• High-Quality 3D Feature Set:
  nVIDIA CineFX engine
  - CineFX shading architecture
  Support for DX 9 pixel shader 2.0+, vertex shader2.0+
  Z-correct bump-mapping
  Hardware-accelerated shadow effects with shadow buffers
  Two-sided stencil
  
  - High-performance, high-precision 3D rendering engine
  4-pixels per clock rendering engine
  129-bit, studio-quality floating point through the entire pipeline
  S3TC texture compression
  Native support for 129-bit floating point, 64-bit floating point and 32-bit integer rendering mode
  
  - Antialiasing
  Blistering-fast antialiasing performance
  Adaptive texture filtering
  Fast Z-clear
  
  - Advanced display pipeline with full nView capability
  
  
• Software:
  DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL 1.4 Optimization and support
  Support Windows XP, 2000, NT(all), 9x and Linux Compatibility
  nVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture(UDA)
  Full compliant professional OpenGL 1.4 API with nVIDIA extensions, on all Linux and Windows operating systems
  WHQL-certified for Windows XP, Windows Me, Windows 2000
  Complete Linux Xfree86 drivers
  

Package Contents:

• GeForce FX5200 Ultra 128MB video card
• S-Video cable
• Power DVD 4.0
• Drivers CD

The card has quite the eye appeal with its great purple color and chrome colored fan. It is an attractive add-on to those with windows on their cases that like to show off a little computer bling-bling. The bundle is nothing to get too excited about unfortunately. The addition of PowerDVD and the S-Video cable make it worthwhile, but overall it's a light bundle.