It depends on your requirements and your budget, and the relevance of the reviews you read depends a lot on when they were written.
It's easy to say that product X is no good and you should go for product Y even though Y costs 2-3 times as much as X. But some of us are on a strictly limited budget, and for those who have to stay under 3k for a gfx card, an FX5200 is still good VFM. It's certainly low-end by current gaming standards, but you can play practically all games at acceptable frame rates if you're willing to play the more advanced games at low settings.
The GeForce 4 series use older GPUs and cannot utilise some of the newer Direct X features. But speedwise some of them are faster than the lower FX5xxx cards even though the FX series are DirectX 9 compatible. E;g., The GF4 Ti4xxx series are much faster than an FX5200, approx in the same class as an FX5700. But all FX series GPUs can use DirectX 9 features whereas Ti cards are compliant upto DX8, and GF4 MX are only DX7-compliant.
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Do PCI cards really work? I think the PCI bus bandwidth is around 135-150 MB per second, while even 4x AGP is 1.1 GB per second....is it jus a namesake thingie?
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Yes, PCI cards work, though they are usually not qute as good as their AGP counterparts using the same GPU. But the difference is not as much as one may expect because the actual data to be processed seldom (if ever) uses the full AGP bandwidth.
If you mean PCI-Express, then that's a wholly different thing. This is a newer standard that has a higher bandwidth than even AGP 8x. But even here, performance depends more on the GPU, VRAM and other design factors because only a fraction of the full bandwidth is utilised.