Just as you would expect, the Asus Extreme EAX1300 Pro uses an ATi Radeon X1300 Pro graphics chip, which is part of the new Radeon X1000 series of chips.

At the top of the X1000 tree we have (or at least had, before the arrival of the X1900) the X1800 with 16 pixel pipelines and eight vertex shaders which are arranged in four units or 'quads'. In the mid-range we have the X1600 which has two quads while the X1300 is the budget chip which has a single quad with four pixel pipelines and two vertex shaders.

The basic X1300 runs at 450MHz with memory that runs at an effective speed of 500MHz but this Pro version has a 600MHz core speed and 256MB of DDR2 memory that runs at 800MHz.

So this is a budget graphics card that has full support for DirectX 9.0c and Shader Model 3, but as it only has one quarter of the internal hardware of the X1800XT and runs with very slow memory you could reasonably estimate that the X1300 Pro will have about one eighth of the performance of the £349 X1800XT, which would make 3D gaming an impossibility.

We tested the Asus and were prepared for the worst so it came as a surprise that we were able to play first-person shooter FarCry with the settings at Very High Quality, a resolution of 1,280x1,024 and 2x Full Scene Anti Aliasing.

We went on to find that we could play F.E.A.R. at 1,024x768 at High Quality and in both cases the game looked fine and played well, although the visual quality wasn't up to the same standard as a high-end £249 or £349 graphics card.

That's as you would expect, because you rarely get something for nothing, but you probably won't see the difference in visual quality unless you are able to carry out a direct comparison between, say, the Asus and an X1900XT, when you will see that a high-end graphics card makes all the objects in a game look truly stunning while the X1300 merely presents them in an acceptable fashion.

The rest of the package is very basic, consisting of drivers, a DVI-to-VGA adapter and a short TV-Out cable. But the single worst aspect of the Asus is the cooling fan. It's quite noisy and is rather intrusive, and presumably is a fairly cheap item as this is such an inexpensive graphics card. More expensive cards tend to be quieter even though they are doing far more work.

Your typical bloated plutocrat reviewer will be inclined to sneer at the Asus EAX1300 Pro as it is a budget graphics card. However, the man in the street will be amazed at the value that it offers. It's not the last word in gaming hardware but it is surprisingly good.