Conclusion
The biggest competitor for the 5200 is the Radeon 9000 both are available for about roughly $70 on PriceWatch, with the 9000 likely a few bucks less. The card performed below acceptable though. Let me clear things up a bit here. That's not Albatron's fault. But the chipset designer. You'll be able to play older games with it decent, period. It's nice to see DirectX9 compatible on that box however if the card does not have the power to make use of that then what's the point ? The card is cheaper than cheap and offers excellent features. However I like to make a strong suggestion to NVIDIA to beef up the performance in the low-end segment. For example you will not be able to play a game like Splinter Cell at an acceptable framerate in even 800x600 pixels. Unreal II ? Forget about it unless you are willing to play it in 800x600. The fact this product does not have an active heatsink is also an issue. It can't be overclocked that far as the graphics core runs very hot, so hot that we did not want to overclock it. I admit fair and square though, I'm a spoiled brat when it comes to 3D hardware and I need to see performance on that CRT before it convinces me, the 5200 series is not a product range I can find myself in. On the other hand, if you need something cheap to get dual display monitor, excellent 2D and you only play games from the Quake III era .. hey then this is an excellent product. So you see, it's how you look at it versus what you want to do with it versus your budget versus your PC. I can only recommend this card to you if you are on a serious budget, and simply must need a card with DirectX 9 support, otherwise _please_ throw in a little extra cash and go for a previous generation chipset based GeForce 4 Ti 4200, Albatron has an excellent GeForce4 lineup you might want to take a look at.
The 5600 is definitely more to my liking. The cooling design pays off. The product will simply not get hot at all. For a reasonable amount of money you can get a card that is performing extremely well and can handle newer DirectX9 titles very good, it's not a killer card though. For that you need to look at a high-end product like the Radeon 9800 or GeForce FX 5900 series. But that comes with the price of course.
Okay summed up: Quality wise both cards seem to be build excellent following NVIDIA's reference design specification, and I just dig that blue PCB, good components made 2D/3D display quality excellent. The 5200 for me personally is a product that I would not buy. It's just not fast enough to do any good in DirectX9 to be called a gamers graphics card. If you don't care about new DirectX 9 titles and just need a feature rich product then it might be your thing though. It's definitely cheap, you'll get nice features like dual display, excellent 2D display however a low performing graphics card. It's nicely built though and I am already sure that it will sell at high volume in the OEM market.
The 5600 is definitely worth considering. It's not a powerhouse though. You can play every modern gaming title with it and does what it's targeted at, mid range performance. The cooling solution is just awesome and helps the product do a reasonable overclock to squeeze some extra performance out of it. Definitely recommended if you can't spend too much on a graphics card. If you do not want to spend heaps of money on a high-end graphics cards then we definitely recommend the product, it's stable and for the money it offers heaps of functionality, features and decent performance. Nice design, good performance .. yeah .. a good graphics card.
Seek the best prices for GeForce FX graphics cards in our price comparison guide.
Thanks to Albatron for giving us the possibility to review their products.
Albatron FX5200 EP and FX 5600P Turbo
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