Many notebooks now come with dedicated GPUs like the GeForce FX Gos from NVIDIA and ATI’s Mobility Radeons. These GPUs are not only powerful enough to play DVDs and render mundane 2D graphics, they are also powerful enough to run 3D games right on your notebook! At least, that’s what their manufacturer claims! Today, we will take a look at one of the new low-cost GPUs from NVIDIA – the GeForce FX Go5200; and see how well it performs in a variety of benchmarks. Come check it out! Link : The NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 GPU Review
GeForceFX Go5200 It would have been nice to see how the Go 5200 compared to the 855GM thats in a lot of lower priced notebooks just to see if its worth the extra money. Im eagerly awaiting the results of the NVStrap tests, it will help be deside what notebook to get next.
Re: GeForceFX Go5200 Hello Necare, I'll try to dig up some 855GM results and update the comparison. But from what I know, it's criminal to even call the 855GM a GPU.
Hello Necare, I found a single i855GM result on Futuremark's ORB site. It received the following results :- Overall 3DMark Score : 92 3DMarks GT1 - Wings of Fury : 12.6 fps All other game tests : Not supported Fillrate (Single-Texturing) : 195.2 MTexels/s Fillrate (Multi-Texturing) : 357.7 MTexels/s Vertex Shader, Pixel Shader 2.0 and Ragtrolls : Not supported Well, there you have it. Confirmation that it IS criminal to call the i855GM a 3D GPU....
Thank you. I didn't think even Intel would have the guts to call something that weak a 3D "accelerator". Reminds me of the virge vs voodoo days.
Yeah, too bad the Go5200 was not as fast as everyone expected. But good news is... It is DEFINITELY much faster than Intel's Extreme Graphics 2. Of course, the Go5200 in the Satellite M30 was underclocked. It was nowhere near its rated clock speeds. I actually managed to overclock the Go5200's core and memory as well as enable its AGP sideband support. In fact, I already have the benchmark results. Will write up an article on this so that we can see hoe much the Go5200 improves with such tweaks.
What a crappy review. Come on, at least you could compare different GPUs with the same specs. Comparing a crippled Go5200 with a fully-capable Mobility 9000 does nothing to say which is a better chip.
On another note, I have a Dell Inspiron 5150 with a 64MB Go5200. How do I find out if mine has the proper clock speeds and such? If you'd like me to do some tests on my machine, lemme know. Thanks.
I have the same laptop and was wondering the same thing after this article. To find the clock speed, you have to edit your registry as follows: REGEDIT [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\NvTweak] CoolBits=dword:00000003 That is, add a Dword called Coolbits and set the hex value at 3. Once you reboot, go into the Advanced tab of the Display settings, and under the nvidia tab, there will be a new option called clock settings or something (can't remember the name right now, but you'll find it). After doing this, I found that Dell has done exactly the same as Toshiba. So far though, I've only managed to stably run it at 265 clock and 530 memory. Crashes at 290 and 580, but haven't tried anything in between. I'm looking forward to Adrian's follow up review and also your own setting-modification experience.
Hello joeljkp, To be honest, it would wrong be to say that the Go5200 in the Toshiba Satellite M30 was "crippled". I said it was "underclocked", not crippled. You see, NVIDIA may set the rated clock speeds for their GPUs but it is ENTIRELY up to the card manufacturer or, in this case, the notebook manufacturer to set the desired clock speeds. That's why you see some manufacturers overclocking the GPUs or use faster memory, thus allowing a higher memory clock speed. There are also those who underclock. These would be notebook manufacturers like Toshiba. It could be to reduce power requirements or the thermal output. But whatever the reasons, clock speeds are ENTIRELY up to the manufacturer, NOT NVIDIA. That is why I tested the Go5200 as is. Even with AGP sidebanding disabled. That is the right thing to do. Clocking the Go5200 to match NVIDIA's recommendations would not be fair. For those interested in finding out if clocking the Go5200 higher will make the GPU more competitive against its competitors, well, I have already said I would be writing up a separate article on that. I will try to speed it up and post it as soon as I can.
Hello joeljkp, That would be great! You can use RivaTuner to find out what clock speed your GPU is running at, as well as overclock it. Or you can use the Coolbits hack that eleo recommended. If possible, please benchmark your system using 3DMark03, Aquamark3, Unreal Tournament 2003 and Comanche 4 Demo. All using the NVIDIA Rev. 52.16 driver, of course. If possible, please see if you can tell us your default clock speeds (and the GPU's scores at those speeds) as well as your maximum core and memory clock speeds (and their benchmark scores). Thanks!
Sure, I'll try. WinXP isn't my default OS (I'm a Linux guy), and I'm a busy college student, so don't expect it today or anything. I'll give it a shot, though. Thanks for the info and the nice challenge
Hello joeljkp, Just download the Rev. 52.16 drivers from http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k__52.16.html. Then uninstall the Dell drivers and install the Rev. 52.16 drivers.
Yeah, I tried that, but NVIDIA's driver's won't "take". I tried forcing Windows to look in c:\NVIDIA\WinXP2000\52.16, too, but it said it couldn't find any drivers for my device. I thought the reference drivers didn't work for mobile GPUs?
Okay, when Windows XP asks you for the driver, you should select the choice of choosing the device driver manually. Only then search for the driver in c:\NVIDIA\WinXP2000\52.16. Alternatively, there is an easier method. Just go to that directory and double-click the Setup.exe file.
Setup.exe did nothing. It went through the process, but didn't load a driver. Yes, I rebooted. After I tried that, I did the above 'search for drivers in folder' option. I also tried 'find driver manually', then 'Have disk...' and pointed to the 52.16 .inf file, but there was no GeForce FX Go5200 listed. There were several 5200s, but no Go5200.
It should work if you just select the GeForce FX 5200. Funny, the NVIDIA driver should work with your GPU. But if it doesn't work, I guess you will have to test using the Dell driver.
