SCHEDA VIDEO INNO 3D GEFORCE 6200 512MB AGP NVIDIA GRAFICA VGA

The budget sector of video cards (and pretty much everything else) has been overshadowed of late by NVidia's SLi and ATi's Crossfire technology.  The lure of running multiple VGA cards is intoxicating but it doesn't address that sector of the hardware shoppers looking for a low cost, full featured video card.  NVidia announced their cost conscious version of the GeForce 6x line, the GeForce 6200 (NV44) back in December 2004.  These cards have been slowly coming to market in the past couple of months in two distinct flavors.  The first of these is the GeForce 6200 which is a PCI-E solution embracing NVidia's TurboCache technology.  TurboCache allows the VGA card to utilize system memory to enhance performance while keeping end costs down by requiring less physical RAM be on the card.  The other is the GeForce 6200A which is the AGP version of the same NV44 chip.  The 6200A differs from the 6200, aside from the interface, in that it sports 128mb of local memory instead of the 6200's typical 64mb configuration.  The reason for this is that the 6200A does not utilize NVidia's TurboCache, making the card dependent on its own RAM to get the job done.

Today, thanks to the folks over at Inno3D, we have one of these AGP based 6200A cards on the bench.  Many of you are thinking what can a budget VGA card possibly do for me?"  Aside from it pricing out at a very reasonable $69 as opposed to something north of three or four hundred clams, the 6200A is a passively cooled product.  You home theater guys are already all over this.  Here in the days of HTPCs, having a single slot, silent video card solution being paired with say a Hauppauge TV-PVR card to run a media center is very desirable.  You don't need SLi or a video card based on the bleeding edge of raw horsepower to run your HTPC.  Let's take a closer look at the Inno3D GeForce 6200A's specs. 

Specifications

• Powered by GeForce 6200A GPU (NV44)
• Interface: AGP 8x
• Core Frequency: 350MHz
• Memory Frequency: 500MHz
• Memory: 128mb DDR
• Memory Interface: 64-bit
• Pixel Pipelines: 4
• Vertex Shaders: 3
• Fill Rate: 1.4 billion texels/second
• Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 Support
• OpenGL® 1.5 Optimizations and Support
• Revolutionary Superscalar Architecture
• NVIDIA® CineFX(TM) 3.0 Engine
• NVIDIA® UltraShadow(TM) II Technology
• NVIDIA® Intellisample(TM) 3.0 Technology
• Full-Speed 32-Bit Color Precision
• Adaptable Programmable Video Processor
• High-Definition MPEG-2 and WMV Hardware Acceleration
• Advanced Motion Adaptive De-Interlacing delivers a crisp, clear video and DVD playback
• Video Scaling and Filtering
• NVIDIA® ForceWare(TM) Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
• NVIDIA® Digital Vibrance Control(TM) 3.0 Technology
• NVIDIA® nView(TM) Multi-Display Technology
• Integrated HDTV Encoder supports up to 1920x1080i resolutions
• Integrated NTSC &