In this article we have a baker's dozen of graphics cards on test, covering both AGP and PCI-E, from the elderly Radeon 9800 PRO to the brand spanking new Radeon X850 XT PE.

If you like your computer games, the graphics card is quite possibly the most important component in your system and naturally one of the hardest decisions to make when upgrading or building a new machine. Inferior processor, motherboard and memory sub-systems may throw a 30% performance swing into the equation. This means that saving money by buying cheaper equipment, and investing the money into a better graphics card can often give much better overall performance for your money.

By covering the complete range of cards from the oldest and cheapest mid range models that can still keep pace with the latest games, up to the very latest high end cards, we hope to give a useful perspective on the issues of relative performance and value for money.

The cards below are split into AGP/PCI-E to save you time. They are also ordered by their 3D Mark score. Testing is explained on page 2. Although benchmarks and specifications are given on each page, there is a summary of these on page 16 and 17. An asterisk below denotes an award worthy card.

AGP
Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro	* MSI GeForce 6600 Diamond Edition	Gigabyte 6800	Sparkle GeForce 6600 GT
* Sparkle GeForce 6800 GT	Asus X800 XT PE	Gainward 6800 GT Powerpack! Ultra/2400 Golden Sample GLH	XFX GeForce 6800 Ultra

PCI Express
MSI GeForce 6600	Abit Radeon X700 Pro	* XFX 6600 GT

Sapphire Radeon X800 XL	* Club 3D Radeon X850 XT PE

For our benchmarks, we have chosen the four most popular and widely used game engines. Unreal Tournament 2004, FarCry, Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. Between them, these games and the many games based on the same graphics engines, account, or will soon account for a large proportion of the FPS (First Person Shooter) market.

All these games were tested at three different settings: 1024 x 768 with no AA (antialiasing) or AF (ansiostropic filtering), 1280 x 1024 with x2 AA and x2 AF, and 1600 x 1200 with x4 AA and x4 AF.

For most people, 1280x1024 is the resolution you should be concentrating on, as this is the native resolution of most TFT screens. It is also the best resolution for most CRTs in order to obtain a decent refresh rate.

All games were run with the maximum texture and effects levels, with the exception of Doom 3, which was run with “high” detail settings, since the ultra mode demands 512MB of graphics memory.

Because we have both AGP and PCI-E cards in this test, we wanted our two test rigs to be as close to identical as possible. We used an MSI 865PE Neo 3 with i865 chipset for testing AGP cards, and an MSI 915P Combo with i915P chipset to test PCI-E cards. In both systems we used an Intel Pentium 4 Prescott 3.6GHz. We also used 1GB of CAS 2.5 Kingmax PC3200 running in Dual Channel mode.

We know this system is probably beyond the specification of what most of you can afford, but we wanted the CPU to hold back this cards as little as possible. If running an older system, expect as much as 30% performance decrease.

We used nVidia Forceware 66.93 drivers and ATI Catalyst 5.1 drivers. Everything else was kept the same.

Take note of the “value for money” rating given to each card. This is the amount of 3D Marks attained per pound, which gives a comparative measurement of value for money.

Sapphire 9800 Pro

The Radeon 9800 Pro has been around for quite a long time now, and used to be a top end ATI card. Due to ATI concentrating on the PCI Express market, they have failed to introduce a mid-range AGP card. Their answer has been to produce a new batch of 9800 Pro cores and let these assume the role.

With 8 pipelines and 256-Bit memory, on paper it looks pretty good and it manages to pull the job off quite well. However, if you try turning on anti-aliasing, the age of the design really shows itself.

Old as it may be, it handles the latest games perfectly well at 1024 x 768, and the value for money rating seems good, but at £130, it is competing with the much newer Geforce 6600 GT.

Buying yesterdays top of the range products instead of today's mid-range products should mean that all the potential problems and compatibility issues have been eliminated, but Half-Life 2 refused to run at our highest test settings, giving numerous cryptic error messages. In general, the scores obtained were a little strange, with a huge step down in performance shown when increasing resolution. This is almost certainly the fault of either Half-Life 2 of the Catalyst drivers, neither of which are renowned for being perfect.

Although these issues should be fixed in a new release, this is beside the point, as it really isn't capable of high settings. Ignore this card; it's yesterday's news. Dig around under the couch for that extra tenner, and get a 6600 GT instead.

Benchmarks

MSI Geforce 6600 Diamond Edition

The Geforce 6600 and 6600 GT chips are clocked at 300MHz and 500MHz respectively. The chips are otherwise identical, and the large frequency difference between the standard and GT versions illustrates the excellent yield they are having with this core.

The MSI 6600 Diamond Edition runs a pre-overclocked 6600 GPU at a comfortable 400MHz. The card also uses 128MB DDR3 memory, running at 400 MHz. What makes this card different from the standard edition, is the use of 2ns memory, which is specified to run at 500MHz. MSI do not however guarantee it at this speed, so have basically underclocked the memory.

Because of this underclocking, we ran all the benchmarks at the default speed of 400/400. This means that performance can be over 25% less than the higher clocked GT card. However, our test sample cheerfully overclocked to 500/500, and kept going, up to 565/565. This GPU is crippled mainly by memory bandwidth, but thankfully this memory can keep up with the pace and yields a 3000 point 3D Mark increase to 9072.

This huge increase puts it way out in front of the standard 6600 GT, and even gives the 6800 a run for its money. The value rating of 48.6 at the cards default speeds is good to start with, but at the 500/500 speeds that the silicon can easily reach, this goes up to a whopping 59.3, giving over 8190 3D Marks for only £137.

Benchmarks

Gigabyte Geforce 6800

The 6800 vanilla is a crippled version of the GT/Ultra series, with only 12 rendering pipelines and 128MB of memory. Much like the 9800SE or 9500 series of cards, there are software hacks available to unlock the extra pipelines. This isn't guaranteed to work, but it's certainly worth considering.

Even with 12 pipelines, performance is pretty good, lying somewhere in between the 6600GT and the 6800GT. A more sensible name might have been the 6700. Much like the 6600GT, it struggles in the higher resolutions, but is quite happy at the 1280x1024 sweet spot.

The biggest selling point of this Geforce 6800 is the fan-less heatpipe cooler. A pair of heatpipes wrap around to the back of the card, transferring heat to a chunky secondary heatsink. This arrangement means that despite the size of the cooler, the card still fits in one slot, but there may not be sufficient clearance to fit it in some SFF PCs. Cooling is perfectly adequate in an open system, but case ventilation of some kind may be needed for cramped cases.

This is the fastest card you can get if you insist on a silent computer, and performance isn't severely compromised. You can forget about overclocking though, it is not a very practical proposition with the passive cooling.

At £180, the price isn't much higher than what you might pay for a fan cooled 6800, and the price sits between the 6600 GT and the 6800 GT. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite have the value for money of either of these cards.

Benchmarks

Sparkle 6600 GT

This 6600 GT from Sparkle has the highest value for money rating of all the AGP cards on test. The card runs at the standard AGP 6600 GT clock speeds of 500/450 on the GPU and memory. This is slightly short of the standard 500/500 clocks used by the PCI-E version. We are unsure why these lower clock speeds are chosen, other than to make PCI-E seem like a superior technology.

Since the Geforce 6600 is a native PCI-E design, this AGP card has a bridge chip, which is so complex and power consuming it needs a heatsink of it's own. This chip is responsible for a small drop in the cards performance, but it is still an attractive mid-range card.

The 6600 GPU is an able overclocker, and surprisingly the Samsung 450 MHz memory reached 500 MHz, bringing another 1000 3D Marks with it. The cooling is reasonably quiet and very effective, never getting more than slightly warm to the touch. A standard 3D Mark score of 7876 puts this card comfortably ahead of the last generations top end cards, but still struggles with extremely high resolutions and Anti-Aliasing.

The card is in direct competition with the MSI 6600 Diamond Edition, and whilst it has faster standard settings than the MSI card, it doesn't quite have the same potential for memory overclocking, so the decision is entirely down to how adventurous you are feeling.

Benchmarks

Sparkle 6800 GT Platinum

This 6800 GT from Sparkle sports a large, heavy yet ornate cooler with no less than two fans. This makes quite a racket, but with a little creativity this could be solved. This is not ideal however, and there are cards on the market with significantly quieter cooling arrangements. The plus side to this system is that is only takes up one expansion slot, making it the perfect solution for a SFF (Small Form Factor) PC.

At default speeds, this card really does fly, making full use of its 16 rendering pipelines and high speed 256-Bit memory. Most of this extra speed is noticeable when the settings are really cranked up, so depending on your display configuration, you may not notice the difference.

Overclocking was fairly reasonable at 410/550, up from the default 350/500. This brings it up to a slightly faster speed than a 6800 Ultra. This increases the 3D Mark score from 11,394 up to 12,820, just 200 points shy of the pre-overclocked XFX Geforce 6800 Ultra.

There are, of course, no guarantees that the card will be overclockable, but even at standard speeds its great value for money compared with a 6800 Ultra at over £100 more. Unfortunately for ATI, they don't have an AGP card to compete with the price point of this card. For now, the 6800 GT is still the best choice for high performance graphics at a sensible price.

Benchmarks

Asus Radeon X800 XT PE

The X800 XT PE is ATI's attempt to keep up with the nVidia 6800 ultra. Whilst it does match the 6800 Ultra's performance, except in Doom 3 where they have the advantage of UltraShadow II, these cards are very hard to find, because they are just higher clocked X800 XTs, and the yields are very poor.

This is why they have now been superseded by the X850 XT PE, made on a smaller process, and clocked even higher. ATI are soon to replace the entire x800 family with x850 equivalents, all using the improved 110nm manufacturing process, with slightly higher clock speeds as a bonus. Since it is almost impossible to find an x800 XT PE in stock anywhere, and it is shortly to be discontinued, this review is already out of date and irrelevant even as it is written. However, the benchmarks of the card provide a useful comparison point for the Club 3D x850 XT PE card also reviewed in this group test.

The new x850 has much better yields, and should be easily available very soon. This means that the x800 XT PE is effectively obsolete already, despite being the fastest card currently available. Even if you could find an x800 XT PE in stock anywhere, it would be wisest to bide your time and wait just a couple of weeks for the x850 XT PE to hit the shops.

Benchmarks

Gainward 6800 GT Powerpack! Ultra/2400 Golden Sample GLH

This Gainward graphics card is a bit like a fire engine; big, red, noisy, and fast. The card is a Geforce 6800 GT, and part of Gainwards pre-overclocked "Golden Sample" range. This "Goes Like Hell" version is guaranteed to reach even higher speeds.

At 400/600 GPU and memory clocks, it is faster than the standard 6800 Ultra speeds of 400/550, but not quite as fast as some pre-overclocked 6800 Ultras, such as the XFX also reviewed.

A little experimentation proved the Gainward could go further, and the GPU reached 440MHz, exactly the same speed achieved by the XFX 6800 Ultra. Gainward have fitted a 2-slot cooler, with a massive shroud that covers the complete length of the card. On our test system, the card was touching the SATA hard drive connector, and was within a millimetre of touching the top of a capacitor close by.

Since this card is £20 cheaper than the XFX 6800 Ultra, it is a practical alternative for the performance enthusiast.

The non-GLH Golden Sample 6800 GT costs £27 less than the GLH, and has guaranteed 400/550 MHz clock speeds, making it effectively a standard 6800 Ultra, for only £310. In many ways this is an even more attractive deal, especially if you don't fancy cranking clock speeds beyond the limits of your warranty.

Beware of Gainwards model naming schemes, which can be at times very confusing, as Gainward produce a large number of cards, some with only very small differences between them. Check the specs carefully before buying, to make absolutely certain you are buying the right thing.

Benchmarks

XFX Geforce 6800 Ultra

This 6800 Ultra from XFX is pre-overclocked, running 425/600 MHz GPU and memory, compared with the standard 400/550 specifications.

XFX don't advertise this on the box or in the documentation, which is strange because you might think they would want to make it clear that this card is a cut above the ordinary Ultra.

XFX's card is visually identical to the pre-release reference samples first seen in April 2004. XFX have only added their sticker onto the fan shroud. The bulky cooler with its centrifugal blower and heatpipe take up two card slots, and the blower makes a soft hissing sound like radio static. It isn't the quietest, but it's a more restful sound than the frantic screaming of the usual axial fans.

Attempts at overclocking even further gave a 440 MHz GPU speed, coincidentally the same speed achieved by the Gainward card also on test. The card is as fast as the Radeon X800 XT PE in all but Half Life 2, which is a title ATI just happened to throw a lot of money at. Unlike the X800XT, it's available to buy right now, which is a big point in its favour.

£363 is a lot of money for a graphics card, considering the 6800 GT is available for £100 less and has very similar performance. However, this pre-overclocked XFX card typically costs only £10 or £20 more than a standard speed 6800 Ultra, and holds the crown as the fastest nVidia card, and is the fastest AGP card currently avaliable.

Benchmarks

MSI Geforce 6600

The MSI Geforce 6600 is in some ways the most surprising card in this group test. The standard GPU/memory clocks are 300/250 MHz, and the card uses 256 MB of ordinary DDR memory. The Geforce 6600 is a highly overclockable core, but we never expected this sample to reach 590 MHz. That's a 96% overclock, using the standard cooling, and no voltage modification.

The big catch is the use of slow DDR1 technology. This core is mainly held back by memory bandwidth, hardly keeping up with the GPU at 300MHz, let alone 590MHz. This massive overclock results in a disappointing 20% overall performance increase.

Having 256MB instead of the usual 128MB frame buffer used on mid range cards does very little to fill the performance void, and only brings the cards price up. The card may be the cheapest in the group test, but it is a false economy when you consider another £30 would buy a 6600 GT which is almost twice as fast.

The card shows clearly how important fast memory is to a graphics card, and how larger quantities of graphics memory cannot compensate for slow memory. It also demonstrates just how much untapped potential the Geforce 6600 core has, which can be unleashed only with the help of fast DDR3 memory.

Benchmarks

Abit Radeon X700 Pro

The X700 Pro is part of the Radeon X family, but has 8 pipelines to the X800 XT's 16, and 128-bit memory instead of 256-bit, making it almost exactly half as fast. The GPU and memory run at 425/432 MHz respectively.

The card reviewed is the 256 MB version, which for once, does run faster than the 128MB version, except in Farcry where a 50% reduction in performance can be seen. A future driver upgrade is supposed to fix this "bug". The X700 Pro is a low heat output chip, and some other manufacturers make passive cooled versions of the board.

Abit have opted to use a heatsink and a small fan, which although it cools the GPU fairly well, has a whiny noise and the memory modules can get very hot, especially when overclocked. Our test sample managed only an extra 10MHz of GPU speed, but the Samsung DDR3 memory reached 485 MHz, and may have gone further with some extra cooling, as the chips were too hot to touch.

This card is 1000 3dmarks short of the performance of the XFX 6600 GT, which costs only £15 more. The 128MB version of this card is about £20 cheaper, which is likely to offer better value for money.

Benchmarks

XFX Geforce 6600 GT

This 6600 GT from XFX is another pre-tweaked card, with a standard 500MHz GPU, but 550 MHz memory, 50 MHz faster than the standard PCI-E 6600 GT, and 100 MHz faster than the AGP 6600 GT. This extra memory bandwidth available to the GPU gives some great benchmark scores, and the best value for money in the entire group test.

Gainward have to spend a lot of money hand testing each card to make sure it reaches the guaranteed speeds. XFX on the other hand, don't overclock the GPU and just fit faster memory. Because of this, they manage to keep the cost of their cards down, in some cases making them cheaper than standard cards!

The GPU overclocked happily to 555MHz, almost disappointingly low compared with the speeds reached by the rest of the 6600s on test. However, the memory did very well, hitting 600 MHz, which is as fast as graphics memory comes at the moment. This gave a 3D Mark 03 score of 9214, a third more than the Radeon 9800 Pro which is in the same price bracket.

Upgrading to a PCI-E based system is costly, often involving a new motherboard, CPU, and power supply, so this card will ease the strain on your wallet, whilst leaving you open to a future upgrade, since it supports SLI. Good though it is, this card is still a niche product, as most people haven't changed over to PCI-E yet, but this is definitely one to watch as the price of SLI motherboards come down.

Benchmarks

Sapphire Radeon X800 XL

The Radeon X800 XL is effectively a slower clocked version of the X800 XT, and uses the same 16 pipeline design, but on an improved 110nm process, improving yields and reducing power consumption.

The XL is more powerful than the cut-down 12 pipeline X800 Pro, based on the previous core. Running at clock speeds of 400/500, this card is no slouch, considering the top of the range X800 XT PE runs at 520/560. Performance is very close to nVidia's 6800 GT, but the price is a considerable amount lower and certainly worthy of consideration.

The X800 XL GPU doesn't use much power, so it is a pity that Sapphire have opted to use a small and very noisy heatsink and fan, rather than the much quieter ATI reference design.

The newly revised core should mean the X800 XL has good overclocking potential, but our test sample demonstrated why you can't rely on being able to overclock, by refusing to run more than a couple of MHz above standard speeds.

The card we have reviewed is the full retail version, which includes the games Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell. There is a "lite" version available, which is a little bit cheaper, and comes without the games. The X800 XL is a worthy competitor for the Geforce 6800 GT, but this example is let down by its cooler. At just over £200, it fills a gap in the market nicely.

Benchmarks

Club 3D X850 XT PE

The X850 XT PE is the very latest top end graphics card from ATI, and this example comes from a fairly new manufacturer on the UK scene. Club 3D sell cards from every possible chipset producer, with an emphasis on relatively no-frills cards which offer the best performance possible for the price.

The X850 XT PE is an updated version of the X800 XT PE, built to solve the production problems that made the X800 almost completely unavailable to the public. This card uses ATI's reference cooler, which is the first 2-slot cooling solution that ATI have used. It uses a centrifugal blower, and exhausts hot air out of the case via vents in the blanking plate.

The X850 XT PE is clocked slightly higher than its predecessor, at 540/590 MHz instead of 520/560 MHz, giving it a slight performance boost. Whereas the x800 XT PE sample we tested wouldn't overclock by a single MHz, this x850 managed 560/600 MHz speeds, showing that this new core isn't as overstretched as its predecessor. The X850 is only an evolution of the X800, but it fixes all of the problems of the old core, giving ATI a credible top-end card to challenge the 6800 Ultra.

As you may expect, the X850 XT PE edges out the 6800 Ultra in almost every test, but it is a very close competition. The retail price for the Club 3D X850 XT PE will be around £385, almost exactly the same price point as the Geforce 6800 Ultra. However, the most important issue that separates the cards is slot standards. The X850 XT PE is a native PCI-E chip, and whilst the PCI-E cards will be in the shops very shortly, it is unknown when we will see an AGP version available.

The X850 XT PE is the new king of graphics cards, but it comes at a very high price when you factor in the hidden cost of upgrading to PCI-E.

Benchmarks

In case you haven't made up your mind yet, here is an overview of all the products on test in this round up. Benchmark results are on the final page.

AGP

PCI Express

AGP

PCI Express