Leadtek Winfast PX6200 TC TDH 256MB

Benchmarks & Comparisons With Half-Life 2 It Shipped!  And it's GOOD! Half Life 2 Thanks to the dedication of millions of gamers and a huge mod-community, the original Half-Life became one of the most successful first person shooters of all time.  So when Valve announced Half-Life 2 was close to completion in mid 2003, gamers the world over began chomping at the bit.  Unfortunately, thanks to a compromised internal network; the theft of a portion of the game's source code; a couple of missed deadlines; and a tumultuous relationship with the game's distributor, Vivendi Universal, we all had to wait until November 2004 to get our hands on this gem.  We benchmarked Half-Life 2 with a long, custom- recorded timedemo that takes us along a cliff and through a few dilapidated shacks, battling the enemy throughout.  These tests were run at resolutions of 800x600 and 1024x768 without any AA or aniso and with 2X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently.

Half-Life 2 really is a dream come true in a performance sense.  Not only does the game have amazing visuals, it doesn't murder your hardware to get the job done.  While integrated graphics really isn't an option, the Leadtek PX6200 put up a fine showing, even offering playability at 1024x768.  Like Doom 3, the game seemed pretty smooth, even with a lot of action.  Surely, the Leadtek card will have no trouble with Half-Life 2 on a decent system.

When we first got a glimpse of NVIDIA's TurboCache line, we were impressed.  They went back to the drawing board to devise a new, efficient and economical way to improve value-class graphics, while bringing reasonable performance to the masses.  By balancing memory allocation between onboard memory and system memory, users had a new option when considering upgrading integrated graphics with a value class add-in.  Thanks to the high bandwidth capabilities of PCI-Express, OEMs have a lot more room to get creative, and TurboCache is a product of that creativity.

Throughout our testing of the Leadtek PX6200 TC TDH 256MB PCI Express video card, its virtues over integrated graphics were obvious and significant.  For a minor cash outlay, those on a budget can consider a nominal upgrade that will improve overall system performance while giving that user the option of a little casual gaming along the way.  Overall, not a bad solution for those not too serious about gaming but don't want to be left out completely.

In the end, we were pretty impressed with the Leadtek PX6200 TC TDH 256MB card.  Leadtek brought a simple, yet capable graphics solution to the mix and offered up a decent retail package as well.  Selling in retail channels for around $69-75, the Leadtek PX6200 TC TDH 256MB can bring the average user better performance at a very reasonable price point.

We Give the Leadtek PX6200 TC TDH 256MB Video Card a Hot Hardware Heat Meter Rating of a...

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