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.

Two GPUs on one card sounds promising in theory, but this card didn't shine in all our tests. It does have four DVI ports though, so if you've always wanted to run four monitors off one PC, then this is the card for you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Gigabyte GTX260 (GV-N26-896H-B) is an impressive high-end graphics card that packs quite a wallop. However, it's also a little overpriced and failed to impress in our DX9 benchmarks.

Inno3D's move to overclock this card is nice in theory, but we saw very little improvement in performance. Fortunately there is almost no additional cost for the added speed, so it may be worth buying, especially if you're comfortable about overclocking your own hardware

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.