There's one striking difference between this card and the others on review here. This isn't an AGP card, but rather a PCI device. In other words, it's aimed at those with older machines that don't have an AGP slot.

And as you would expect, it's not an expensive card, priced at the fifty quid mark. For the money you get a half-length PCI card powered by Nvidia's 128 bit Vanta chip with 16MB of memory onboard. A big fan sits on top of the GPU and should keep it well cooled.

The package is minimal as with many of Pine's budget PC card offerings; all you get is a CD with the drivers on and a small instruction pamphlet with the tech specs and very brief (and not too helpful!) installation instructions.

Technically speaking, for a PCI card the Vanta is reasonably well decked out. The 16MB of memory runs at 125MHz, the chip's RAMDAC clocks at 250MHz and it does provide 32-bit colour graphics (including a 32-bit Z-Buffer).

Installation went without a hitch and when it came to testing the performance, we had some mixed results. The 3DMark 2000 test didn't actually run properly in all the modes so it's difficult to gauge the performance from that, although Quake III Arena ran without a hitch.

And at a very reasonable speed in normal, 640 x 480 mode, too. However, when the graphics were cranked up to high quality, the poor Vanta began to creak considerably, just about maintaining a semi-playable frame rate. When the resolution was boosted too, the whole house of cards fell down.

The Vanta can handle moderately detailed 3D pretty well; just don't push it too far. It's a sound budget solution for those still stuck in the PCI graphics world.