i bouight a Geforce Fx (inno3d) 5200 just today .. but it was not the 128MB one ... it was the 64 MB one.

1. the 128mb was out of stock so i had to settle for this, plus it was cheaper.

2. was this a good buy? i was scoring really low on the 3dmark tests at 6fps on almost everything except the airplane demo. is 3dmark supposed to try to challenge your system to the limits?

im running an athlon xp 1800+ with 512 MB SDRAM.

what if i bought a geforce4ti 128mb? would i have been happier?

That card is similar to the GF4 TI 4200 except that the 5200 supports AGP 8X, and it should perform well.

Forget the benchmark tests, and check the performance in your games.
If the frame rates are too slow, then reduce the resolution, color depth, and/or game graphics settings, and disable anti-aliasing and anistropic filtering.