Just how BAD is the GeForce FX 5200?

NVIDIA's FX series isn't often regarded in the most positive light, but the lowest budget card in the line got the worst of the flack. In this video I trudge through the performance results of this bottom-feeder to find some good, if any, in using one.

Platform specs:
Athlon 64 X2 4400+ @ 2.8GHz
2GB PC5000 @ DDR510
ASRock 939Dual-SATA2
Samsung 830 Series 128GB SSD

[Kasou]

FX5200 was the first brand new GPU I bought for my system back in the day to replace my second hand TNT Riva. It was

[DmanDmax]

Dumb 13 year old me bought this one back in the day.
Still have ptsd.

[somegit]

I man, memories of the disaster that was the whole FX line. My friends were "upgrading" to FX5200 and FX5500 while I opted for a discounted GF4 Ti4200, best decision ever, that thing ran circles around them.

[BokinatorX]

I beat Half-Life 2 with this card! All stutters but it ran! Did not know this was slower than a GeForce 2! I even had the pci version (since my crappy Dell lacked agp slot), which means it had even less bandwidth. This was the card that made me decide that I never want a slow computer ever again. I wonder if my RTX 2080 Ti is 5000x faster than this POS

[sacriptex]

i remember changing my geforce mx 440 64 for a fx5200 i regreat months after! sweet early 2000's

[miamivinc]

the FX series certified directx 9 on the box, that joke running counter strike source Dx9 with my FX5900XT -> 12 fps / Dx8.1 55 fps

[IVANxVx]

Had this as my first graphics card even after it was severely outdated. I think I beat hl2 with it with an average framerate below 20fps. Great video, subscribed!

[jkostans]

The 128-bit PCI version is a great alternative to a Voodoo3 PCI if you have a AGP-less 500+MHz pentium 3 system. You get better performance, image quality, and good win9x compatibility for 1/10th the price. Plays everything up through ~2001 at solid frame rates.

[kanopus]

Never owned an nvidia FX GPU. Jumped from a Geforce4 ti4200 to a Radeon 9700, and performance was very good.

[mattpierce]

Thanks for this video man, you just saved me $4

[soylentgreenb]

Note that the FX5200 requires different and much newer drivers than something like a TNT2 or geforce 2 GTS. On a slow CPU this can almost halve performance. For a slow PC, like sub 1 GHz windows 98 SE machine you don't really want to go with anything newer than geforce 2 or 3 and you want to carefully pick the driver version to a stable and quite old driver like 8.05. If you're building a core 2 duo, P4 or athlon 64 windows 98 SE machine then by all means get the FX 5950 ultra or whatever as the CPU performance is grotesquely higher than needed and won't become limiting.

[Merjia]

I got one of these for christmas. Loved it :D

[KathrynsWorldWildfireTracking]

You're so chill with your disgust. I just subbed.

[namecannotbeblank]

I recently fixed up my first PC that had one of these paired with an Athlon 2600+ and 512mb of RAM, and I've been pleasantly surprised by the performance. I have it hooked up to a 1920x1200 monitor, and it's been powering through almost every 90s game I throw at it. It even ran Heroes of Might and Magic V (my favorite xp era game). It didn't do great, but it was semi playable.

[dabombinablemi]

After hearing you mention the highly varied clock speeds, I decided to compare the FX5200 Ultra to the 256MB FX5500 (what I bought). What was even the point of the 5500 when the 5200 Ultra had the same 128bit bus, but with far higher core and memory clocks. Unless NV34A2 was that much worse than NV34B1 in other ways....

Still glad I bought it though, it does far better than any of my older cards (which barely peak at DirectX 7), while having full support under Windows 98.

[AlValentyn]

When I was young I nearly "upgraded" to a 5200 from my GF4 TI 4800SE. So glad the PC World employee at the time talked me out of it.

[SanderSander]

My first card I bought with my own money hahaha. It gave my PC an good upgrade. With my Pentium 2.4ghz and 512mb ram .

[johndee]

Thanks for the review. What drivers and OS did you use?

[ВладимирГалицкий-хц]

And FX series up to 5600 was last series which supported all nvidias features such as table fog 8bit textures. So yes, fx5200 64bit version still can be a good choice.
What type of a driver did you use?
My current is 56.xx or 45.xx for XP, and 43.xx for win98.

[someguy]

May be a crap card, but it has some niche use now. FX cards are actually great for retro Windows 98 builds because of cost + performance + compatibility. 3dfx Voodoo cards are ideal but cost an arm and a leg these days, and earlier Geforce cards aren't as great with Glide wrappers. As for later cards, Geforce 6xxx is obviously faster, but they're not as compatible with older games (no fog table, etc). Cards newer then that don't have drivers for Windows 98. So the FX series ends up being in that sweet spot, and among them, the 5200 is the only one that has a low profile version. So for the very niche group of people who want a low cost and small form factor retro Windows 98 gaming PC for playing games from 1996-2000 (anything later is better on a XP machine anyways, and the card struggles with anything newer), the 5200 is actually a great choice (as in really the only choice if you want full compatibility).