Albatron GeForce TC 6200 Q

The Little Card that Could

by Josh Walrath

            Perhaps the biggest selling point of this card is the support of PureVideo.  This technology is designed to take much of the workload from the CPU when rendering video in several different formats.  It uses an advanced de-interlacing to give outstanding video quality and DVD playback, in addition to a higher quality video scaling.  It is also aimed at high quality HD playback, and offloads much of the work for HD playback from the CPU.  The only downside to this is that to utilize many of these features, the DVD decoder must be purchased from NVIDIA (unless it is bundled with the video card).  Also, Windows Media Player does not come ready to fully utilize the PureVideo functionality at this time.  Specialized DLL’s are needed to fully integrate all of the PureVideo functionality into that product.  Still, the functionality that is exposed through products such as PowerDVD, WMP 10, and WinDVD will give the average user a much better video experience than with many competing products.

The card itself is not terribly exciting to look at, and the heatsink is very simple.  The heatsink barely gets warm with the 6200 TC chip anyway, even when overclocked.

            The second biggest point of the 6200 TC is that of utilizing all of the 3D features and functionality of the GeForce 6800/6600 series.  It has full SM 3.0 functionality, as well as the ability to handle all SM 2.0, and PS 1.x rendering paths.  While its four pixel pipelines may not be powerful enough to adequately render SM 3.0 paths in games such as Far Cry and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory at resolutions abover 800 x 600, it should be more than adequate enough to power titles that utilize SM 3.0 but are not so dependent on fast frame rates (things such as future Simms titles, or 3D real time strategy games).

            The 6200 TC architecture certainly looks to be a very impressive product for the $79 and below market for PCI-E. 

Albatron’s TC6200Q

            The TC6200Q is Albatron’s nomenclature for its 64 MB/64 bit 6200 TC.  While it has 64 MB onboard, it can address up to 192 MB of main memory when 512 MB or more are present.  This gives it a total of 256 MB of addressable memory utilizing onboard and system memory through the PCI-E bus.  Aggregate bandwidth is 4 GB/sec through the onboard memory (64 bit x 250 MHz x 2-DDR), and on the tested Athlon 64 939 6.4 GB/sec through the main memory (the 8 GB/sec HyperTransport and 8 GB/sec PEG connection are not bottlenecks in this situation).  So, approximately 10.4 GB/sec of memory bandwidth are theoretically available for the 6200 TC, but this doesn’t take into account how the CPU and other peripherals are utilizing main memory.  In realworld applications the chip is probably receiving around 6 GB/sec of bandwidth at any one time.

            The board itself is a pleasant blue with the attached gold heatsink.  It is a very simple looking card, but it has some nice features.  It has the DB-15 VGA connector, the DVI-I connector, and the S-Video out.  The board supports nView, which will allow multi-monitor functionality when used with a DVI to VGA adapter.  Unfortunately there is no VGA to DVI adapter, so two DVI based LCD monitors cannot be used at once.  The S-Video scales up to 1024 x 768 for TV’s that can accept such a resolution.  It does not have a S-Video to component adapter included in the box.

Albatron provides the DB-15, DVI, and S-Video plugs.  This would be an excellent card for an inexpensive dual monitor setup.

            Looking at the card initially, I was not expecting much in terms of 2D quality.  Oftentimes lower budget products sacrifice 2D quality at higher resolutions.  This is not the case with the TC6200Q.  Even up to 1600x1200 the image onscreen remains sharp and clear.  In many products that I have tested, usually anything over 1024x768 becomes fuzzy and indistinct.  Luckily that was not the case with this product.

            The bundle that was included is not spectacular, but for the price conscious it is to be expected.  It comes bundled with a driver disk, a game demo disk, and the full version of Arx Fatalis.  This title was released in 2001 to much acclaim, and from my short time playing it, I would agree that it is a very solid game.  The only problem is that it only nominally works with the latest video cards.  After applying the patch, there are quite a few graphical anomalies that nearly make it unplayable at times.  There are some work arounds that have been posted, but out of the box the game does not want to work with any of the current generation cards.  JoWood is the publisher that sold this title to many OEM’s, and they refuse to address this issue.  So, for those wishing to play this game, some patience and homework needs to be done to have an enjoyable experience.

Next: Testing

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