Conclusion

The tests used in this article are primarily tests that are geared towards being able to show the graphics performance on high end boards, hence they utilise all the highest rendering settings that the game provide such that all titles are not constantly CPU limited, however these high detail settings aren't necessarily the ones you would want to use on an entry level board and often they do not show the product in the best light. That said, though, the 6200 managed to equip itself fairly well under normal rendering with all the high details enabled, in a number of titles used here, showing fairly playable frame rates at 1024x768 - there are a few titles where you may find yourself juggling options and resolutions in order to strike a balance of performance and quality, and that will even more so be the case if you wish to use any of the board high quality options such as FSAA or Anisotropic Filtering.

When compared in previous GeForce 6 articles we have seen the similar characteristic of the newer GeForce 6 based board thoroughly outperform its previous generation FX class board by a wide margin. The 6200 is no exception with it managing to outperform the 5200 Ultra in virtually all cases and sometimes up to a factor of 5 times! This is just another indication of how much more effective the GeForce 6 architecture is over the GeForce FX architecture, especially where Pixel Shaders are required.

In comparison to where the 6200 stands in the rest of the GeForce line, though, pricing of this board by NVIDIA's vendors is going to be fairly crucial. The 6600 GT has a suggested price of only $199, whereas the 6200 has a suggested price of $129, which is more than half the price of the 6600 GT and yet the 6200 often displays less than half the performance - dependant on your point of view, which will largely depend on your budget, this either makes the 6600 GT very good value for money or the 6200 poorer value for money. Given there is also a 6600 (standard) configuration, which we were unable to use here, that fits between the boards in terms of price but has all NV43's internal texture / Pixel Shader pipelines enabled, dependant on price this would also be an option that should be considered if you are looking at these level of boards. Naturally, prices change as soon as they hit retail and inevitably all the retail prices have shifted from those  prices suggested when the boards were first announced.