The graphics card market has seen a satisfying shift towards more punch for your pound over the last few months, thanks to Nvidia and ATI both readying higher-end solutions.

Recently, we saw the ATI Radeon 3850 HD, a sprightly budget card loaded with 512MB of memory for a smidge over £100. But if the budget will stretch, say, another £60, then at the time of writing, a tasty-looking 8800GT comes into play. And this one is loaded with an equally tasty-looking 1GB of memory on board.

Of course, it's easy to get swayed by specifications, and the truth is that 1GB of 256-bit GDDR3 RAM on a graphics card is a little bit overkill. While it clearly has visual benefits, bottlenecks elsewhere in the system offset much of the potential good. Yet there's still a case for more than 512MB of RAM on a graphics card, and so you can hardly accuse Xpertvision of being too wasteful.

The rest of the card, which occupies - as is the norm - a double space (there's no way this would fit in a Shuttle box, especially when you factor in the heatsink), comes loaded with a large, reasonably quiet on-board fan and some impressive specifications.

It has a GPU speed of 600MHz, a memory clock rate of 1,800MHz, dual DVI output (maximum resolution is 2,560 x 1,600), TV-out and is fully DirectX10 ready. It also boasts HDMI out of the box, but this is a bit of a fudge. That's because the card itself doesn't have an HDMI-out as such, but in the box - just next to the free copy of Tomb Raider Anniversary - is a dongle. This ‘converts' a DVI port into an HDMI output, but you then need to route your audio through something like SPDIF if you want proper digital output. Not ideal.

Still, it more than made up for this when we started throwing games at it. Call Of Duty 4 and Crysis are the current choices in the IT Reviews office, and it was refreshing to play both of these at high detail levels with little problem.

We also tried playing Blu-ray and HD DVD movies, which again posed little challenge (the card is HDCP certified), while the performance benchmarks we ran certainly put last month's 3850 in the shade. 3D Mark 06, for instance, threw up a score of 9,407 for the ATI card and 10,816 for this 8800. That's a near 14 percent performance boost.

Still, if it's a budget or mid-range card you're hunting for, the truth is that the 3850 is still going to suit most of the people, most of the time. If your demands are higher and you have the wallet to match, though, then the £160 asking price for Xpertvision's board is hard to quibble with. And given the current trend in the market, we can't help wondering if further bargains are just around the corner.

Verdict
A solid, well-priced, mid- to high-performance graphics card that offers plenty of power for the vast majority of gamers.

Company: Xpertvision

Contact: 00 49 2154 498860

Tags: video card tomb raider anniversary digital visual interface ati technologies random-access memory hdmi ati advanced micro devices