MadShrimps compared seven different video cards which don't cost you an arm and a leg. Using FRAPS and several popular games we test the performance and try to find the best value for your money. Here's a taster:

If you are a less demanding gamer you'll find that you don't need the latest and most expensive video card out there to enjoy gaming, even with low-range models you can get acceptable performance if you sacrifice detail and high resolution. From the low range cards in this roundup the Sparkle 6600GT and Powercolor X800GTO are most interesting, the Asus X1300 Pro Silent only advantage is its passive cooling solution, which makes it a prime candidate for a non-gaming HTPC. The performance of the X800GTO and 6600GT is quite on par throughout the games, older games run fluently at higher resolutions while newer games requires you drop detail levels. The 6600GT can be paired and run in SLI which makes its overall performance jump up and on par with a single 7600GT in some games.

The Asus X1600XT offered mixed results, sometimes performing on par with the mid-range products, sometimes doing worse than the low-range video cards. Again its main selling point is the passive cooling, it has more horsepower than the X1300 Pro so it will be more suitable for gaming, however at price close to that of the mid-range products like the Club3D X1800RX which offers better performance, it's hard to recommend.

At the top of the price range sits the eVGA SuperClocked version of the 7600GT, it took the performance crown in this roundup, outperforming the X1800GTO consistently, however the performance increase over a 7600GT running at reference speeds is not really worth the extra asking price. The 7600GT's bottleneck is not the GPU or Memory clocks speeds but the amount of pipelines. The X1800GTO on the other hand, while trailing the 7600GT, scales better when overclocked, seeing increases up to 20%.