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The NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200
Recently, we posted a review of the NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200 GPU. The second slowest in the GeForce FX Go family, it was nevertheless a full DirectX 9 GPU. Let's refresh our memory of the GeForce FX Go family.
|
Go5700
|
Go5650
|
Go5600
|
Go5200
|
Go5100
|
|
|
Core
|
NV36M
|
NV31M
|
NV31M
|
NV34M
|
NV34M
|
|
Core Clock
|
350MHz (Performance Mode)
450MHz (Desktop Replacement Mode) |
325MHz
|
270MHz
|
300MHz
|
300MHz
|
|
Memory Clock
|
300MHz
(600MHz DDR) |
300MHz
(600MHz DDR) |
300MHz
(600MHz DDR) |
300MHz
(600MHz DDR) |
300MHz
(600MHz DDR) |
|
Memory Bandwidth
|
9.6GB/s
|
9.6GB/s
|
9.6GB/s
|
9.6GB/s
|
4.8GB/s
|
|
Memory Support
|
128MB
|
128MB
|
128MB
|
128MB
|
64MB
|
|
AGP Support
|
8X
|
8X
|
8X
|
8X
|
8X
|
|
RAMDAC
|
400MHz
|
400MHz
|
400MHz
|
350MHz
|
350MHz
|
Unfortunately, this GPU failed to shine as far as raw performance was concerned. Although it has full DirectX 9 support, the GPU was apparently too weak for DirectX 9 support to matter at all.
Of course, the manufacturer of the notebook, Toshiba, configured the Go5200 with a core speed of 199MHz, a memory speed of 405MHz and a small 32MB memory buffer. As you can see above, NVIDA rated the Go5200 with a maximum core speed of 300MHz, a maximum memory speed of 600MHz and a maximum memory size of 128MB.
With such a small memory buffer, AGP texturing would definitely be required. Unfortunately, the motherboard used in the Toshiba Satellite M30 only came with support for AGP 4X. Worse still, Toshiba disabled the Go5200's AGP sideband support for some reason.
Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to see how well the Go5200 can performed if it was reclocked and its AGP sideband support enabled. Although nothing can be done about its small memory size, the boost in clock speeds and AGP sideband support should speed things up quite a bit. Let's see how I fared!
