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Inno3D GeForce 6200A AGP Installation/Operation Installation of the card and the included 76.10 drivers went without incident. I did of course have to give the current 71.89 NVidia drivers a try which as expected, did not recognize the NV44 GPU. The 76.10 drivers are experimental and still immature. This was apparent in the lack of crispness of the icon labels on the desktop or in word documents. I am choosing to view this as not the fault of the Inno3D 6200A but rather an indication that the 76.10 drivers are a work in progress not ready to be released to the public. After some playing around with the card under power, I wanted to see what kind of heat this passive sink would generate in an intense gaming environment. After an hour of Far Cry, the cooler was too hot to touch. No visual abnormalities or anomalies in the display but the cooler was indeed HOT. Our IR thermometer showed the cooler's surface to be 158 degrees Fahrenheit (70'C) at its center. Our test bed was on an open rack. While this allows the heat to dissipate directly into the ambient air, it does not allow for the draw of a case fan that would normally be circulating air inside a case. All in all, I think these two balance each other out for our testing purposes.
Performance We broke up our testing of the Inno3D GeForce 6200A into two parts, subjective and objective. First, we plugged the Inno3D 6200A into a HTPC test bed to see how well it performed in that capacity. Dropping everything into a Silverstone LC-10 HTPC case we did not find any issues with the passive cooling overwhelming the interior components with heat. Normal HTPC functions were flawless and the silent and slim Inno3D 6200A perhaps has found a permanent home in my HTPC rig. The second part of our testing shifted to more traditional dyno testing to see what kind of horsepower the 6200A packs under the hood. Putting our normal gaming suite of tests in the queue, we have Far Cry, Doom3 with the Tech Report's TRDemo2 and TRHaze demos and Half Life 2 with Anandtech's Canals and Coast Demos. Running these in addition to a few hours of just regular game play we hope to get a good feel for the budget NVidia. Our comparison AGP card is our vanilla 128mb GeForce 6800. This is a pretty lopsided match up. However, keep in mind that the 6200A isn't about LAN party frame rate rodeo rights but rather silent and solid performance aimed at the mainstream crowd. In the following performance graphs are the results of five runs per product per bench with the highest and lowest scores for each card being thrown out. The remaining three were then averaged and that is what you see here. Test Bed Pg 1 - Introduction |
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