TrustedReviews take a look at the 7600 GT and ATI X1800 GTO.

Results were almost neck and neck with two minor exceptions. Naturally, Quake 4 was skewed towards the 7600 GT due to its superior OpenGL rendering engine and support for UltraShadow II. More importantly, in Battlefield 2 the 7600 GT really started to suffer when FSAA and AF was switched on, with 20-30 per cent difference noticed. This is most definitely due to the extra memory bandwidth on the X1800 GTO. However, it only really affects game play when used at the 1,920 and 2,048 resolutions, which unless you have an older CRT or really expensive TFT panel, can't be used.

What is interesting is how much improvement we saw from running two 7600 GT cards in SLI. We noticed 80-90 per cent improvement, even at 1,280 x 1,024 where it matters most. On average, across all the benchmarks and resolutions there was a 60 per cent improvement in performance, which is not to be sniffed at.

Buying two 7600 GT's is in a similar price bracket to buying a single 7800 GTX 256MB, so I decided to compare to this with astonishing results. On average, the two 7600s were 20 per cent faster. However, more commonly I saw 30-40 per cent improvement, with 55 per cent improvement in Battlefield 2 at 1,280 x 1,024. However, if I had L250 to spend, I would probably buy a single card rather than two 7600 GT's. The benefit shown here, is merely the ability to add another 7600 GT later in the day when prices have dropped even more and attain some serious improvements in performance.

The X1800 GTO and 7600 GT are very close performance wise and I wouldn't want to let that weigh too much in to my buying decision. The form factor of the 7600 GT is considerably nicer, being smaller, quieter and cooler. The X1800 GTO is loud, clunky and annoying.