Legit Reviews

Hello people.

I just bought a GF6200 gpu with 256mb gddr2 memory running on ancient agp 4X/8X slot. My motherboard is gigabyte Titan P4 556 or something. All this time I thought, that my 300W PSU was behind all the problems, but now (after buying a more stronger 550W PSU- 20A on 12v rail)) im back where I started.

1. After installing the GPU my pc wont boot. However it boots if I install back my old 5600FX.
2. Card gets warm, so at least I am sure it is powered.
3. I cant see any external power supply, which should be connected to make it running.
4. I'm connencting through the VGA monitor cable. The screen is black- no visible random stuff going on.
5. I also tried to connect the card on a video driver-clean (to avoid any conflicts) system setup, but same thing- the black screen of death.
6.I have heard, that there is some thing, that should be done in bios to make such card run, but I cant think of any... The card is pretty similar to my old 5600FX- so it should run driver-less and should be seen as "Unknown Video Controller" or something.

Im running Windows XP SP2 32bit, 640mb of ram and two HDD's.

P.S. I bought the card from some random guy. He swore that the card ran smoothly on his system, so I am starting to think, that he isn't completely honest with me.

Have you tried installing the suspect card in a different system?

Also, when you say that it won't boot, do you mean that the computer itself will not turn on, or can you hear the fans going yet nothing is booting on the screen?

Well the fans are running (PSU,CPU and GPU), the green diode (which is suppose to mean, that the system is on) is glowing and the red LED is glowing also (it indicates the use of HDD's), but one thing is kinda strange- the red LED is glowing, but the HDD arent humming... And no, I havent tried the card on other systems, but im looking forward to do so.

Sounds to me like you bought a faulty video card. You do know that some people lie, right?

An old Dell I just sold has a GF 6200 and I used to swap it out with a GF 5200 with no problem. It even found the drivers on its own. You tried using driver cleaner pro, right?

When you swap the cards, does windows report "new hardware found"?

3 - That card does not require an external power supply.
4 - Does your monitor report "no sync input"?
6 - Nothing is required to be changed in the bios to swap out those cards afaik.

That also seemed strange to me- if there is no signal coming in then my monitor should show the "no signal" sign but that is not happening. Its just black- not glowing black but black as it should be when the pc is not running. It is rather difficult for me to see any hardware because of my being in such- black state. And no I uninstalled the drivers mannually via monitor properties->settings->adapter and so on. Though I thought that such cleaning would be enough. I also uninstalled the built-in adapters drivers that way which forced me to reinstall windows because after that my previous instalation would start black screened.

And the thought that the bastard has been lying to me has been in my mind for past two weeks. I just asked you guys because well... I might be forced to take action that could be stepping out of boundries of the law. I just want to be double sure that it is his fault and that he swindled me on purpouse. He is not answering my e-mail and phone so ill just do some researching and have my revenge! Dont worry nothing serious- maybe some fast drying concrete by his front door or something like that.

make sure you try the card in a different AGP system and if nothing than he did lie to you. I didn't know there is an AGP version of the 6200

I don't recommend revenge or private justice.

As Sbohdan said, I do highly recommend that you try the video card in another agp machine prior to reaching a conclusion. There can be other issues especially when the motherboard has onboard video.

I just can't get past the part where it runs with the 5600 and not the 6200....weird!

Can you return the card? I say that because the performance difference from those 2 cards will be negligible. I didn't notice a difference from my 5200 to a 6200.

Return the card... The guy is not answering to my e-mails, phone calls and other means of communication! Right now I am thinking of sending him a fake e-mail letter and just hope that he will be stupid enough to send his home adress. And I did not by the card to gain any performance boost. The cooler on my 5600 broke down and at first i decided to make my own cooling solution by glueing a cooler from some orher video card to the radiator. At first the rpm's were a bit too low so I added some juice (have you seen a cooler hovering in the air?), but the EMP froze my system. Still the card without a cooler would overheat very often and I sometimes experienced some performance drops. So now I am just thinking of buying some cheap agp videocard which should be a little more powerful than my old one.

i have a 1650 PRO 512 that i'm not using because my motherboard died

How nice... I was just looking forward to get one of those. Maybe you could load it in some ballistic missile and shoot it to Latvia? Im pretty sure that other conventional shipping costs would be much higher than the actual value of the card.

rudis wrote:How nice... I was just looking forward to get one of those. Maybe you could load it in some ballistic missile and shoot it to Latvia?

LMAO...I love your sense of humor.

my old x1800XL was too powerfull for the motherboard i had at the time. I had that problem with every boot.
So what i had to do was wipe the cmos (either by removing the battery or by touching jumpers). Then it would start but give an error, the error would just say "no cmos" and it would make default one. of course i couldnt make any changes because to boot it would have to be wiped every time. on restarts without wiping it, my maching would simply go black.

The problem was unconfirmed but im sure it had something to do with VGA colour. I had this HW combination for a year so i made a wire connected to the jumpers (that wiped the cmos) with a switch which was just in a hole on the front of the case, i held it in for a few seconds then the normal turn-on button would make my pc post :D.

The motherboard at the time was either an ICS or Gigabyte, cant remember.

tl;dr , try wiping the CMOS.

I'd rather make my bet on that the guy who sold me this card is a lying asshole. Card being too powerful? How can that be? Too much memory or too high data bandwidth? I just can't imagine anything- if something is weak it should only bottleneck the system. But still- ill try the card on a diffrent system before trying your method.

I hope you didn't pay too much for the 6200. That really sucks that you would get screwed like that. This is the reason why buying used hardware is a risky business.

rudis wrote:Card being too powerful? How can that be? Too much memory or too high data bandwidth?

There are cases when a new card doesnt support an old method of doing stuff (in my case the card didnt possess the function allowing the bios to use a certain colour scheme and crashed with garbled colours or none at all). of course, you can blame the motherboard for doing it in the first place.

This post is pretty old, I assume he has solved the problem by now.