We only got our hands on the XFX GeForce 6200 for a short time, but we're glad that we did as this 128MB graphics card is a reference product that is typical of the GeForce 6200 cards that you're likely to find on sale, regardless of the brand name that they carry.

With a price tag of £70 the XFX is a budget graphics card by any definition, although these days there are even cheaper models on the market such as the XFX 6200 Turbo Cache which only has 16MB of onboard memory, and which connects to the system memory over the PCI Express bus for 3D duties. The XFX 6200 Turbo Cache costs a paltry £45 but we don't have one to hand so are unable to comment on its performance.

When we plugged the GeForce 6200 into our test PC we saw that the core speed was running at 300MHz, while the memory runs at an effective 550MHz, which is much as we expected. It came as a complete surprise when the XFX trounced the AOpen card in our first round of benchmarks as the AOpen runs its memory significantly faster than the XFX so we were looking forward to overclocking the XFX.

Unfortunately it was not to be as the option for automatically overclocking the card was greyed out in the Nvidia drivers. We had a quick stab at manual overclocking and found that the XFX would run similar clock speeds to the AOpen Aeolus 256MB card in certain tests but would crash out of others, and then we came to our senses and realised that the enthusiast is unlikely to buy a GeForce 6200 in the first place so its overclocking abilities don't much matter.

The XFX is impressive as it has the ability to play the latest DirectX 9 games such as Doom 3, as long as you keep the resolution down, and you get the benefit of the pixel and vertex shaders, but it's too slow to make hardcore gaming an enjoyable experience.

On the plus side the XFX GeForce 6200 shows just how far budget graphics cards have advanced in recent times.