PNY VCGFX52PPB Geforce FX5200 128MB Pci Card

i did a lot of research before buying this card, and in my honest opinion this is one of the best PCI graphics cards you can get, and at $100 is a great deal. i was playing unreal tournament 2003 on my dell dimension p4 1.8ghz with 512mb ram and standard onboard intel 3d graphics running windows XP home, and i had to play with practically all graphic options unchecked and set on the lowest settings. after i installed the card (see below) i gleefully checked every box and pumped all options to the max, and was rewarded by a beautiful game in its fully glory, and at an even better framerate than before. well worth it.

to install, it was somewhat of a hassle. the drivers included on a cd didnt work, and i had to go to pny's site to download them. but they send you over to nvidia to get the drivers, and since nvidia is the chipset and not the card, they provide drivers only with no support whatsoever. so, i got the drivers in, got direct x 9 installed, and no dice. you have to...Read more

I upgraded my old 32MB SDR NVIDIA GeForce 2 MX 200 to this baby and it made all the difference. I use to live in the GeForce 2 MX era and that's changed to the GeForce FX 5200 era.

About in the year 2000, I use to have a 3DFX Voodoo 2 card with 12mb graphics memory powered by a Pentium 2 450mhz with 128mb sdram with Win 2000. I couldn't play any 2000 games, I was stuck with older late 1990's games, and they didn't run so perfectly. When I upgraded to a P3 733mhz with 256mb of ram and swapped the NVIDIA GeForce 2 MX 200 32mb sdr(that's not ddr, please note) about at the end of 2000, I was screaming dude. My games were much smoother, looking a lot better and my system was much faster with more free memory and faster response times. I thought I was big dadio until I started to notice a performance drop in the most demanding 2-D and 3-D applications of 2001. In 2002 I could hardly play some of the average games of 2002, and in 2003 I couldn't play any average 2003 early games. I thought...Read more

I bought this card at Best Buy and I can recommendi to anyone with no AGP running Intel Integrated Graphics. The Improvement in Halo was incredible, and all the three major graphics (specular, shadows, decals) became available. This card also features Hardware T&L so games like KOTOR, Call of Duty, and Rainbow Six 3 became playable when on the integrated graphics they were not. However when you are upgrading from integrated graphics you must think ahead! Before shutting down to install the card, disable the onboard graphics in the device manager, and make sure you have the latest drivers (it is a 10 meg download so if you have 56K get it ahead of time). one final thing: do not have any cards under this one because the fan will reverberate and make an extremely annoying sound.