Relatively speaking, the Verto is a very fast graphics card, depending on the resolutions at which you run your games and which advanced feature sets you enable. The low-end Verto GeForce FX 5200 Ultra's overall performance is very similar to that of the Ti 4600-an excellent example of how performance scales with each subsequent technology generation. There are still plenty of Ti 4600s on the market, and there probably will continue to be for a little while longer as Nvidia ramps up production of its FX family of chips. For those seeking faster performance, PNY offers a GeForce FX 5600 AGP and plans to release FX 5600 Ultra and FX 5900 Ultra AGP cards by the end of June.īefore GeForce FX GPUs came along, the GeForce4 Ti 4600 sat atop Nvidia's GPU hierarchy. PNY is fully committed to the GeForce FX family it also offers a non-Ultra version of the 5200 in both AGP and PCI flavors.
In addition to the drivers on CD, the Verto comes bundled with NVDVD for DVD movie viewing Verto 3D World, a 3D desktop interface and a full version of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell game. We then downloaded and installed the most recent version of the drivers directly from Nvidia's Web site, which ran just fine. Ultimately, we had to uninstall the drivers in Safe mode.
The display became garbled, and we kept losing synchronization with the monitor. We had significant problems, however, once the display drivers on the bundled CD were installed. Our testbed is such a system, and we had no trouble following the special instructions. We also found a separate sheet of paper in the box with instructions for users with Nvidia Nforce-based motherboards.
Before you install the card, however, make certain that your system's power supply is at least 250 watts and isn't already powering too many components, or your system might not have enough juice.Īccompanying the Verto is a detailed installation manual. Don't have any spare power connectors available inside your system? Do not fret: PNY conveniently bundles a Y-adapter power connector, allowing you to share the power source from another component inside your PC. Like many of today's powerful new graphics cards, the Verto requires an external power source. As a thoughtful bonus, PNY also includes an S-Video cable. The card also supports simultaneous dual displays and comes with a DVI-to-VGA converter to meet the needs of users who have two analog displays. The Verto has enough ports on its backplane to satisfy the needs of nearly any user: VGA, DVI, and S-Video out. There are a number of other architectural differences within the FX GPU family that influence performance and price. As a point of comparison, the high-end GeForce FX 5900 Ultra has a core speed of 450MHz and includes 256MB of DDR SDRAM running at 425MHz. The 5200 Ultra GPU is positioned toward the lower end of the GeForce FX family line, with a core speed of 325MHz and 128MB of DDR SDRAM running at 325MHz. As its name implies, the Verto GeForce FX 5200 Ultra is driven by an Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 Ultra GPU (graphics processing unit). A complete set of cables and a full version of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell complete the package. Despite the target-market confusion, the Verto delivers solid performance to those not concerned with playing their games at high resolutions or with advanced feature sets enabled. With so many iterations of the GeForce FX graphics engine hitting the market, the PNY Verto GeForce FX 5200 Ultra's price tag falls somewhere above value but below the mainstream segments of the market. When a relatively low-end graphics card comes close to matching the speed of the previous generation's performance leader, you know that the hardware engineers got something right.