Sapphire has a new Radeon X1600XT video card which has a passive cooler with a twist, while MSI has a new GeForce 7600 GS card with a passive cooler. Both support video acceleration and HD playback - which one should end up in your rig?

Gaming performance: There's little to choose between these cards in the two quick benchmarks that we ran. Both are capable of delivering decent performance when set to reasonable resolutions. If you're running an LCD with a 1280x1024 resolution (or a widescreen 27" or 32" TV that is 720P resolution) then you're going to get really good value for money when it comes to gaming. Although the MSI was faster at Lost Coast, the Sapphire was slightly faster at FEAR.

Video acceleration: Both NVIDIA and ATI have gone great guns to get their video acceleration from a standing start to this in the space of a year or so. Whilst ATI was first off the mark with Avivo, NVIDIA has caught up. Both deliver top-range image quality in HQV when looking at DVD and standard definition playback. Whilst both firms would argue back and forth about small details, when you take out the fact that most Brits have no use for cadence correction then there is really little to choose.The ability to play 1080p video is fantastic, with no dropped frames and no tearing. This is a great reason to have a decent video card inside your home theatre box, since even the fastest CPUs are incapable of this under Windows. Both cards performed almost identically when it came down to decoding HD. However, the one area we saw a difference was at 1080p - the MSI was clearly better in terms of CPU utilisation, although the output was the same.