We all were amazed when NVIDIA launched its GeForce FX 5200, the first DirectX 9.0-supporting graphics card for $79, but we were quite surprised when such graphics cards appeared for sale in Japan for considerably higher price (see this news-story). Although we have not had an opportunity to test the GeForce FX 5200, based on reports from Asian and some other web-sites we know that such graphics cards are not really fast. However, at this point it is not the case. After carefully looking through the lists of specifications of the GeForce FX 5200-based graphics solutions we noticed that all products that have 128MB of DDR SDRAM memory onboard also utilise 128-bit memory bus, while quite a lot of graphics cards (I mean all that we have checked so far, but we cannot guarantee that all the GeForce FX 5200 cards are the same as observed by us) with 64MB used only 64-bit memory access (so far we checked AOpen and eVGA boards, but we believe that there may be other products with the same bus on the market)!

If I am not mistaken, we have not seen graphics cards with 64-bit memory access for some time already, at least, the last such graphics cards I can recall are the RADEON 7000 (or RADEON VE), the GeForce2 MX200 and the GeForce4 MX420 (either used 128-bit SDRAM or 64-bit DDR SDRAM). All solutions could not provide enough speed for playing more or less advanced computer games when they were quite popular two or three years ago and one of the reasons why these products were very slow was their 64-bit memory bus. Of course, they were enough for working with 2D graphics and even playing old games, but they were definitely not for serious gaming. Now some graphics cards makers try to sell us something similar, but based on another graphics processor. With 400MHz 64-bit DDR SDRAM and 250MHz core-clock, performance of the GeForce FX 5200 with 64MB should be a bit higher than the speed of the GeForce2 MX400, but definitely slower than the speed of the GeForce4 MX440.

Summing everything up and keeping in mind that now any GeForce FX graphics card costs above $100, we would not recommend you to get a GeForce FX 5200 graphics card with 64MB of DDR SDRAM memory since it may utilise 64-bit memory bus and thus be too slow in 3D applications and not suitable for comfortable gaming. Furthermore, it is doubtful that these cards will be a good buy even for $79...