PNY Verto GeForce 6 6200 PCI

...came to the conclusion that PNY and NVIDIA were names to look out for. I was surprised by the lack of choice in PCI graphics cards on Dabs and Ebuyer so bought my card from an eBay shop for just over £50 delivered which was at the time the cheapest I could find. In the package was the card itself, a driver CD, a case sticker, an S-Video cable, a DVI-VGA adapter should you need one, and a very basic and universal install guide. The only strange thing ...
...the required specs on the PNY website of a 300W PSU and P3 CPU.

After recently installing a new PSU and CPU I was confident in my ability to install the card, after all it's just a matter of pushing it into a slot and tightening a screw. My mobo has three PCI slots and slot three was being taken up by a Firewire card, so I installed the graphics card in slot one to allow a bit of space between them as I knew it was likely to generate ... more

There comes a point in every PC's life when it has to be upgraded or replaced. I'm firmly in the upgrade camp when it comes to such decisions and my ageing Emachines 170 which started life with a 1.7 GHz Celeron CPU, onboard Intel graphics and 128mb soon needed a little spent on it as new software was released.

My first step was to fit a 512mb RAM stick in the spare slot and more recently I've upgraded the PSU and installed a 2.8 GHz P4 Northwood together with a meaty heat sink and fan.

These choice upgrades certainly transformed the usability of the PC in every department but the weak point now lay in the low-spec graphics GPU onboard the motherboard. I don't play all the latest games but I do have a fondness for the original Unreal Tournament and the online racing game Live For Speed which would only run at a mediocre frame rate on the lowest of the low settings. Unfortunately my version of Trigems' Imperial motherboard doesn't have an AGP slot so my hunt for a good quality PCI graphics card started.

After a bit of Googling and a quick read of the e4allupgraders forum I came to the conclusion that PNY and NVIDIA were names to look out for. I was surprised by the lack of choice in PCI graphics cards on Dabs and Ebuyer so bought my card from an eBay shop for just over £50 delivered which was at the time the cheapest I could find. In the package was the card itself, a driver CD, a case sticker, an S-Video cable, a DVI-VGA adapter should you need one, and a very basic and universal install guide. The only strange thing about the packaging was a sticker on the outside of the box stating the minimum required specs were a 400W PSU and a P4 Prescott CPU which didn't match the required specs on the PNY website of a 300W PSU and P3 CPU.

After recently installing a new PSU and CPU I was confident in my ability to install the card, after all it's just a matter of pushing it into a slot and tightening a screw. My mobo has three PCI slots and slot three was being taken up by a Firewire card, so I installed the graphics card in slot one to allow a bit of space between them as I knew it was likely to generate a considerable amount of heat. And that's when the trouble started! I connected the PC back up with the monitor connected to the onboard gfx, and with everything crossed pressed the power button, only to receive a long beep then two short beeps from the BIOS which then continued to boot up the OS as normal. A quick search told me that those beeps meant my Phoenix BIOS didn't like the graphics but I went ahead and installed the drivers off the CD anyway. The card was recognised by the system but in Hardware Profiles gave an error code of (10) with a message alongside stating that the graphics card couldn't start, whatever that means.

I looked on the PNY website which gave a list of the error codes in detail but number 10 didn't match my issue at all and a link on the support section entitled "how to install a graphics card on a PC with onboard graphics" didn't work whilst all the other links around it which were no use to me did! How annoying! Referring back to the very useful Emachines forum I read some tips on how to disable the onboard graphics to get the PCI graphics to work, I was a bit wary of this however considering I had an error code on the new card but decided I'd have a nose in the BIOS out of curiosity anyway. After some frustrating trial and error not knowing which button or combination of buttons would get the BIOS open I eventually got in using the ESC key and saw that the graphics had already set itself to boot from the PCI slot rather than onboard so knew something must have been amiss. I decided to open the PC up again and try the card in another slot, I switched on again whilst holding my breath and waiting for the beeps…

…but this time they didn't come. At first when booting up with the monitor plugged into the new gfx card I'd get the loading screens but then it would go black screen so I reconnected the monitor to the onboard graphics, disabled the onboard in Hardware Profiles and rebooted with the monitor on the new graphics card. Wiping sweat from my brow I took a sigh of relief, I'd finally got it to work. Then I just updated the drivers to the latest version from PNYs website as the drivers on the CD were from 2005, and changed the screen resolution on the easy to use yet comprehensive control panel which also lets you set up multiple monitors.

When I'd switched the PC off the day before I'd turned the Live For Speed graphics settings up to maximum (which had ground the game to a halt), so that when I got into a game with the new graphics card in place I'd be able to see the difference it made. And WOW! What a difference, even with the graphics turned up fully on Live For Speed and with several other online cars on the circuit it still ran silky smooth. Only when a whole field of cars was bunched up in a tight corner with lots of scenery did it show signs of a drop in frame rate, and this could easily be teased out by tweaking the detail settings slightly if you were ultra picky.

After a blast on LFS I checked the GPU temperature using Everest Home Edition and saw that it was sat around 64 degrees C, I didn't know how this compared to other GPUs so out of interest I emailed PNY tech-support to see what temperature range it would run at. I was pleasantly surprised to get an email back the next day telling me it was likely to run at between 70 and 90 degrees C and would only start experiencing problems if it exceeded 90 degrees and was heading towards 100. This was the answer I was looking for and was happy that it ran fairly cool considering it only has a heat-sink rather than a noisy fan like higher spec cards have.

Unreal Tournament ran ultra smooth with max settings even in large maps with loads of players, and i was instantly playing better thanks to the smoother performance plus the GPU didn't even get as hot as when playing LFS. Sniper Elite also ran very smoothly on max settings and this put the temperature of the GPU up to around 71 degrees C.

Overall, with very little outlay I've been able to upgrade my PC to a respectable standard and have not had the hassle of buying or building a new PC and installing all the software etc.

If you're stuck with PCI slots on your motherboard and are currently using onboard graphics, this is the card that will transform your PC. Highly recommended. 

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