RegHarware take a closer look at what the two cards have on offer and what you get for your money. It's a very close call on which card to choose and it really comes down a lot to personal preference and a bit of luck in sniffing out the best price. The X1800 GTO is a cut-down Radeon X1800 XL, so it's not new technology. Neither is the 7600 GT, which owns its heritage to the 7800 and 7900 series of GPUs. To be fair to Nvidia, the 7600 GT is from its most recent generation of graphics chips, while the X1800 GTO comes from an older line. It's nonetheless a very capable card as you'll see from the benchmark results.

Performance-wise the GTO has the edge. It won all of the game benchmarks except for F.E.A.R. and it also came first in 3DMark 05. The 7600 GT beat it in 3DMark 06, though only in the four tests it could do out of 12, due to the fact that it won't do FSAA with high dynamic range (HDR) enabled. So if you're in to the few HDR titles that are out there, you might well want to consider the X1800 GTO in favour for the 7600 GT.

Both cards have their own video processing systems, Avivo on the ATI and PureVideo for Nvidia. Neither yet offers as stand-out benefit over the other. The 7600 GT comes on a more conveniently size board than the X1800 GTO, sports a more friendly, less intrusive cooling system and it doesn't need an extra power feed.