If you’re a stickler for innovation, ATI’s ‘double-or-nothing’ approach is unlikely to tickle your fancy, but it remains a powerful performer. On the other hand, its benchmark results were not as impressive as we would have liked from a top-end graphics card.

The Sapphire HD3870 is ATI's next generation of GPUs, superseding the HD2000 series and challenging NVIDIA's 8800 GT cards for a place in the mid-range market.

Put simply, if you need a graphics card that’s able to play most recent 3-D intensive games at reasonable performance levels, EVGA’s latest 8800GT variant is a good choice at a reasonable price.

EVGA's e-GeForce 9600 GSO is a tasty little offering with one of the best cost-to-performance ratios we've seen. Hardcore gamers may want to cough up for something a little more gutsy, but for the asking price you can’t go wrong.

Gigabyte has done a great job of making this card run silent. It's not a high-end gaming card, but it will suit those who wish to build a media centre and still hope to play some games.

Although this card is not bad in its own right, it lacks the punch-per-dollar provided by ATI cards in the same price-bracket. But if you're unwilling to leave the NVIDIA camp and are looking for a moderately well-performing budget option, the EVGA GeForce 9800 GT (512MB DDR3 PCI-E) is worth a look.

The Inno3D I-9600GT (H5GTCD) is a top notch graphics card when judged on its own merits, delivering plenty of processing power at a price anybody can afford. However, when compared against similarly priced equivalent cards from other vendors, its performance is left slightly wanting.

For the vast majority of gamers this card is going to be ideal. Those looking for a super powerful graphics card may have to wait or buy one of the high-end options from the previous series, but the MSI GeForce 9600GT is an excellent choice for decent mid-range gaming.

An excellent choice for casual gamers who care more about noise than getting the best performance out of the latest games.

This is a standard graphics card that's suitable for not-too-serious gaming, and for watching Blu-ray movies.

This is a slightly-better-than mid-range graphics card that's suitable for playing DirectX 9-based games at high resolution and detail settings, and DirectX 10-based games at mid-range resolution and detail settings.

When judged on its own merits, the Gigabyte GeForce 9800 GTX (GV-NX98X512H-B) is a hard card to fault. However, the emergence of similarly priced dual-GPU cards has taken some of the shine off its performance.