REVIEW: GeForce 6200A, 15' HDMI and HDMI to DVI-D

Submitted by Eugenia on Tue, 08/14/2007 - 23:44

Geeks.com sent us in for a review the Albatron GeForce 6200A 128MB PCI Video Card w/DVI TV-Out, 15' HDMI to HDMI (Male) Cable and a 12' Samsung Axession D5064 HDMI to DVI-D Single Link Cable. Read more for our experience with the products in conjunction to a 32" TV and a GeForce 8600GTS card.

* Albatron GeForce 6200A 128MB PCI Video Card w/DVI TV-Out

Your first thought is possibly "what? A plain PCI card?". Believe it or not, plain PCI graphics cards still have their usage for motherboards that only have a single PCI-e slot. When you want to drive more than 2 monitors at the same time and your motherboard only has a single PCI-e or AGP slot, you have no alternative but to use a PCI card. And this is how we used the GeForce 6200A card. The card has 128 MB/64-bit memory, support for NVidia's CineFX 3.0, IntelliSample 3.0, UltraShadow II technology and it also supports DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL 1.5. It comes with a 15-pin VGA, an S-Video TV-Out and a DVI-I connector. The package includes a CD with drivers (although there is a newer version available online) and an S-Video to composite converter cable. If you want to connect your TV via S-Video directly, you will need to buy your own cable, but it's handy for the card to come with a composite converter too. Installation was a breeze. The card does not consume much power, its fan is mostly noiseless and it was recognized immediately by our Windows XP and used as a "second" graphics card. We used the card in a video station, where the main card is driving two DVI high-res monitors and this PCI card driving a SXGA VGA monitor and a 32" TV via DVI. We had fears that driving HD content to the TV would over-saturate the PCI bandwidth, but thankfully this never happened. Apparently the PCI bandwidth is enough for HD playback! Overall, this is a great buy if you need such a multi-monitor system!

Rating: 9/10

* 15' HDMI to HDMI (Male) Cable

HDMI cables are traditionally over-priced. But not at Geeks.com. Here you got a 15 foot length HDMI cable and it's selling for under ten bucks! We used this cable from our HDV camcorder to the 32" TV mentioned above and quality bloomed to higher standards compared to when using the component cable that comes with the camcorder. Colors were presented correctly and we observed no visual noise or artifacts. A must-have cable, especially if your TV and your HDMI devices are quite far apart.

Rating: 10/10

* 12' Samsung Axession D5064 HDMI to DVI-D Single Link Cable

As we wrote above, we connected the 32" TV in the PCI card via the DVI port instead of the lower quality signal of S-Video. To achieve this, your TV must support either DVI or HDMI, and this TV only has 1 HDMI. Thankfully, exactly because the HDMI specification is very close to DVI creating a converter cable is easy. This 12 foot converter cable was able to connect our PC and the TV perfectly and achieve a near-PC monitor clarity.

Rating: 10/10