I have an hp pavilion a1130n that is going to get an nvidia geforce 6200 pci express video card installed in it. The box now has ati integrated graphics on the motherboard. Will opensuse autodetect the card or do I need to run sax2 to configure it? Should I use nvidia 1-click install for the driver?

first do have to use 12.1 ?
now there are still 133 days left to it's life
http://en.opensuse.org/Lifetime

12.2 would be a better option ( 378 days of life )

for nvidia 12.1 uses the open nouvau driver ,by default .
If you want to change that to the proprietary nvidia driver
see the openSUSE nivida guide
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA

and if you need to ask then the "repo way" IS recommended ! - but some like the one-click install
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_dr...repository_way

if you use the "nvidia.run" driver then for EVERY AND ALL kernel and xorg updates you will have to reinstall it by hand
also the first time you MUST rebuild ( manually ) the boot image to remove the open nouvau driver from loading on boot

as to the "one click " i have NEVER liked it , others DO like it .
it is up to you .

I wouldnt get a 6200 if you have a PCIe slot. They are ancient (2005), slow and rather dodgy. Also the 6XXX series cards have had support dropped from newest nVidia drivers (its now a 'legacy' card).

Even if you do get a 6200, its (IMO)) pretty much piontless to install the closed drivers. Those cards dont support VDPAU (hardware video decoding) and are slow enough that a newer but still cheap card (e.g. G210) could well be faster with the open source drivers than the 6200 is with closed source drivers.

BIOS...

There may be one or more BIOS settings that have to be changed to disable the on-board graphics chip so that it is not booted first. This may happen even if you have a PCI graphics card installed.

I too would ask you to consider installing openSUSE 12.2. For linux, latest is usually best.

On the other hand, I would use the Nvidia driver one-click installer without hesitation. It will install the Nvidia repository, block the Nouveau driver, give you all the packages needed for the Nvidia driver, install it, and insure its updating when there is a new set of packages from the Nvidia repository for openSUSE.

The version of opensuse is 12.2 not 12.1. My mistake.
Thank you for the recommendations.