Nvidia 6200 vs. Radeon 9250

[TestSpecimen]

Hey guys,

I just had a question that I couldn't find answered elsewhere so I decided to turn here. I'm going to be upgrading the video card in an older PC as it is going to become the secondary machine in the house in anticipation of the purchase of a new state-of-the-art PC. The thing is, is that this PC only has PCI slots so I have to go with a PCI card. I've narrowed down my choices to a PNY Nvidia 6200 256 MB PCI card (for $65.99) and a Diamond Stealth Radeon 9250 256 MB PCI card (for $99.99) and I was just wondering which of these two is the better card? The card would be used for multimedia and some slight gaming, but playing nothing made in the past 5-6 years (think Max Payne and UT). Thanks for your time, and if anyone has any suggestions I'd be happy to hear them!

 

[bharatwaja]

I use a 6200 PCI express version 256 MB in my secondary system which is an A8N-VM from ASUS.... you could have provided your motherboard model and the monitor with preferred resolution to help us suggest a good one... but generally speaking the 6200 is pretty good....

Besides, I wonder why you wud even use it for slight gaming when u are purchasing a new state of the art PC.... but its your preference anyway....

And by slight gaming you mean that u wud play minesweeper/hearts while waiting for somethng to complete on ur second PC then, either of those cards would do for you.... But i would recommend the 6200 cause I have not had very good experiences with the ATI 9000 series, not sure about the Radeon 9250 though....

Also ur monitor size and resolution that u wud use should be a consideration.... What OS would u be using?? XP or so wont have trouble but some Linux distributions have problems detecting 6200, I tried booting from a Knoppix liveCD on my second PC but it would show a VGA port on the monitor with a "?"...., but worked fine on my laptop... Solaris has some problems with certain graphic adapters, but now drivers should be available i guess.... see what others have to say for this....

 

[bharatwaja]

oh, and by the way... "WELCOME TO ANANDTECH! "

 

[will889]

6200 for your purposes should work out great.

 

[betasub]

Spending that kind of money for an old PCI gfx card seems crazy. but if you are determined to make use of an old system for multimedia, then the 6200 is clearly the newer, better featured GPU (9250 is based on the older DX8.1 8500 GPU)..

 

[SorryImLate]

There is also a Visiontek X1300 and X1550 Radeon PCI that they sell on newegg and other sites. Not sure how great they are but they have a faster core/mem clock. FX5500 is also good for pci but has slower clock then the 6200

 

[Slugbait]

If by "multimedia" you mean MPEG playback, then you want the nVidia card.

 

[secretanchitman]

6200 will be fine.