GF4 Ti4200 vs onboard GF6150

I've been living in the dark ages of computing for a good while now, Athlon XPs and AGP graphics cards. It was all fine until things got unreliable, and now I'm faced with the rather expensive prospect of upgrading. The issue is that I don't want to take a step down in performance.

Gaming wise I only really play Guild Wars atm which plays at 1280x1024 with full graphics smooth as a lubed up jelly fish :devilish: I've looked at lots of reviews of motherboards with the 6150/430 chipsets and they seem good, but it's hard to gauge the relative performance. Ideally I'd like to not have to spend another lump of cash on a graphics card, but things still need to be smooth.

So is a onboard GF6150 a downgrade from a GF4 Ti4200?

Its very hard to find relative comparative information because the age is so different (i.e. brand new vs. 4-5 years old).

A few things to consider:

The 4200 Ti was a rocking card in its day and even outperformed much of the nVidia FX5000 series cards, only being hamstrung by its lack of DX9 support.

On-board gfx is generally meant for word processing, watching DVDs, etc. None are particularly good for gaming. The 6150 is the best of the bunch, but I wouldn't think it's performance will be particularly great at gaming. You may need to turn down features and resolution to get it to perform acceptably.

It should be possible to get a rough idea of performance.

Most review sites use Quake III as one of the benchmarks, and have done for years, so a bit of googling should turn up the relative scores.

Cheers guys. It seems most reviewers have upgraded to Quake 4 now, but I did find one site with a 3dmark 2001SE for the 6150, and plenty for the 4200. The onboard is about half as 'fast' according to the scores, but as scrandman said is all about the generation. Deus Ex 2 cripples the GF4 due to DX9 so even poor onboard graphics would be better in that case.

Currently I've got myself a stable system (and the majority of two other computers in the bin to get the parts), so I'll hold off on the upgrade until Christmas or something else breaks.

Blast from the past but here's the specs:
Shuttle SN45G (Nforce 2 Ultra chipset)
AMD Mobile Athlon 2500+ @ 2166MHz
1Gig Ram
GF4 Ti4200 128Mb (passivelty cooled at 90oC load and stable)
Pwns :lol:

I'd say (from personal experience only) that the GeForce Ti 4200 would be a little bit better than the 6150, but not by a huge amount.

A quick browse on Futuremark's website shows the following:
3dMark 05 - 6150 approx 700 marks 4200 None
3dMark 03 - 6150 approx 1400 marks 4200 approx 2100 marks
3dmark 01se- 6150 approx 5700 marks 4200 approx 20,000 marks!! (but about 14,000 using an AthlonXP)

Bear in mind however that you are much, much more likely to have people with exotic systems and super cooling trying to get high scores with a Ti4200 than the 6150, so I wouldnt say scores are exactly apples to apples.

I actually used an onboard 6100 (so slower) to play Unreal Tournament 2003 at 1280 x 1024 with really quite playable speeds.
Pretty much any game that plays well on a Ti 4200 would also play with onboard 6150, although possibly losing a few tweaks and settings. The advantage you'd have by going on-board is
a) less power usage
b) lower overall system temperatures
c) get one with a PCI-E slot and be ready for future cards when the wallet allows :)