Albatron GeForce TC 6200 Q

The Little Card that Could

by Josh Walrath

Test Setup

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 939

MSI K8N Neo 4 Platinum (nForce 4 Ultra)

1 GB (2 x 512 MB) Corsair XMS 3200 XL

Seagate 160 GB SATA HD w/ NCQ

Toshiba DVD-ROM

SoundBlaster Audigy

Windows XP Pro SP2

DX 9.0c

Forceware 71.84 

            I did a couple of interesting things here to hopefully show what this card can do.  While the most common system that the 6200 TC will see is an integrated i915G motherboard with an Intel processor, I thought a 3200+ with a solid nForce 4 board would give similar overall results.  I also wanted to see how a system level overclock would affect the overall performance of the card, since it relies on the main memory for much of its functionality.  So to do this I tested the card at stock speeds, then overclocked the card itself, then overclocked the Athlon 64 to 2.5 GHz core and 250 MHz memory (PC4000), giving the card 8 GB/sec of main memory bandwidth in conjunction with the 8 GB/sec that the HTT and PEG gave.  The results are quite interesting once everything falls out. 

Results

3D Mark 2005

            I figured this would be the easiest pointer to overall performance in stock and overclocked scenarios.  We get a chance to take a look at fillrate and shading power, and how well the GPU scales.  Stock speed is 350 MHz core and 250 MHz DDR (500 MHz effective).  I then took the card to 444 MHz core and 392 MHz DDR (685 MHz DDR).  After that, I kept the overclock and clocked the Athlon 64 to 2.5 GHz core and 250 MHz DDR (PC4000).

            These results show us the amount of potential that the 6200 TC has.  The biggest jump is simply from overclocking the core and the onboard memory of the video card.  Still, the extra amount of performance gained from overclocking the CPU and memory is substantial.  The only odd result here is the system overclock fill rate, which is far lower than just the video card overclock.  However, things go back to normal in the multi-texturing fillrate test (where the results are identical).

Next: UT 2004 Results

Copyright 1999-2005 PenStar Systems, LLC.