Explorer Technology FX5200
Reviewed by James Sams on 08.01.2003
Provided by: Explorer Technology

Benchmarks

Care was taken to eliminate as many variables in the benchmarking process as possible. This care includes turning off all non-essential services and programs and performing each test after a fresh reboot.  Additionally, each test was run 3 times.  All the values presented are averages of the three tests taken.  If a low value is indicated, it is the lowest FPS encountered in all the testing of that category, not the average of the lows from each test.  The results are compared to the Xabre 600 Pro and, on one occasion, a GeForce 4 MX440, that Techwarelabs reviewed earlier on the same system.  All of the benchmarks were taken with the card overclocked as far as it would go, except on the 3DMark scores, where the standard and overclocked tests were conducted to give an idea of the stock performance.

The Test System:

-Asus A7V333
-Athlon 2100XP at 1733MHz
-512MB Crucial PC2100 RAM
-2 Maxtor 7200RPM 40GB HDDs ATA100 and a Western Digital 7200RPM 100GB
ATA100 drive connected via the onboard Promise Controller
-3Com 3905C-TX
-SB Audigy
-Windows 2000 Pro SP3 Build 2195
-DirectX 9

Overclocking

The FX5200 is a very poor overclocker.  Coming at a standard GPU clock speed of 250MHz and RAM Clocked at 380MHz, stability and picture clarity could only be maintained with maximum clock speeds of 280MHz GPU and 390MHz RAM (rounded to the nearest 5 MHz).  After this, frame reproduction immediatley produced a large number of artifacts and eventually locked the system.  Low overclocked values do not appear to be a result of heat, as the problems occurred immediately after setting their values and others have reported similar success (or lack thereof) with overclocking the 5200's.  Even with these overclocked settings, the difference seen between the overclocked and the standard values is minimal.  Also, the overclock, even in the face of my best efforts, is reset upon every reboot of the machine.